


The Soldiers that Stay Together

by moontyrant



Series: The Soldiers That Stay Together Universe [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, BAMF Peggy Carter, Fluff, M/M, Peggy Carter does what she wants, Plot, Some Humor, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, no man left behind, so does natasha
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-03-30 15:37:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 65,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3942196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moontyrant/pseuds/moontyrant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier is a ghost story, dating back more than fifty years. They say he passes the title and his legacy down to deserving assassins, because that is the only story that makes sense. But there are whispers. They say that the Winter Soldier can be in two places at once. They say the Winter Soldier can get in and out of anywhere. They say the Winter Soldier is a particularly advanced robot powered by murder and, for some reason, ethanol. They say the Winter Soldier assassinated Death itself and roams the world, a lost soul with perpetually unfinished business. They say the Winter Soldier eats naughty child spies for breakfast and nails for lunch. They say many things.</p><p>They never say he wanted it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cry Havoc! and Let Slip the Assets of War

**Author's Note:**

> I joy, that in these straits I see my west;/ For though their currents yield return to none,/ What shall my west hurt me? As west and east/in all flat maps (and I am one) are one,/so death doth touch the resurrection.  
> -John Donne

It only took a few days of digging through the Arctic for Hydra to locate the plane they pinned their hopes on, and only a moment’s decision to recover the frozen corpse of Captain America from the twisted wreckage. The Tesseract, unfortunately, was lost to the ice, but Zola had some ideas for the good captain, especially in the wake of his success with his prized sergeant.  Somehow Johann Schmidt had been deposed, no doubt by Rogers’ hand, but if you cut off one head, it is said two will grow in its place. Zola, and Lukin after him, maintained no place in their hearts for poetry, but the situation had a grim sense of balance to it.

 

 

The Winter Soldier is a ghost story, dating back more than fifty years. They say he passes the title and his legacy down to deserving assassins, because that is the only story that makes sense. But there are whispers. They say that the Winter Soldier can be in two places at once. They say the Winter Soldier can get in and out of anywhere. They say the Winter Soldier is a particularly advanced robot powered by murder and, for some reason, ethanol. They say the Winter Soldier assassinated Death itself and roams the world, a lost soul with perpetually unfinished business. They say the Winter Soldier eats naughty child spies for breakfast and nails for lunch. They say many things.

They never say he wanted it.

 

 

When the Tesseract became active under Fury’s unwitting directorship, Hydra moved into action. It was the work of a moment to relocate two heavy cryogenic units stateside and store them in a forgotten warehouse in New York City. Under Pierce’s unrelenting leadership, Project Insight was coming along fine and as long as Fury did his part with Phase Two, Hydra’s dream of order would be realized in as little as three years, hopefully less. But the Tesseract, on which so much of their research and development depended, was active and, clearly, SHIELD could not be trusted to defend it from megalomaniacal space sorcerers with daddy issues. Pierce would need to deploy the Winter Soldier to recover it and then continue the work for Phase Two and Insight in house.

That was the plan, anyway.

The Avengers Initiative recovered the cube, and Loki with it, and Pierce refined the mission: acquire the Tesseract, leave Loki somewhere Asgard could secure him (no sense in beginning an intergalactic conflict before Insight could get off the ground) and disassemble the Avengers. With extreme prejudice.

And then the sky opened up and aliens started falling out of it, blowing things up and making the entire city a goddamn mess. Pierce sat at his desk, pinching his nose while his phone clambered, the World Council no doubt on the other end. After a moment to indulge the wash of horrified self-pity, he fired off a memo to the technicians at the forgotten warehouse.

He drifted out of the forced sleep of cryo to the sound of hushed voices and the palpable smell of fear. Booming explosions, the patter of debris, screaming civilians, a thread of vibration rumbling along the walls and floor filtered into his consciousness. The technicians moved around, bustling, frightened but professional, speaking English this time. North America, the Winter Soldier decided, probably the United States, probably New York. He let his eyes drift open when impersonal hands made to remove him from his chamber and he went, cooperative if weak, knees shaking, neck limp. They folded him into the Chair and he let his eyes slide over the controlled chaos. Needles went into his arm while he let his gaze fall on the cluster of technicians at the second cylinder.

It opened with a series of clicks and a hiss, and the Asset, Soldier Beta, awoke with a gasp audible only to enhanced ears. He did not leave the chamber so much as fall out of it, the technicians heaving him to the other Chair, careful of the metal arm. Soldier Alpha watched them push needles into the other’s flesh arm, depressing vitamins and glucose into his blood. Another explosion burst, too close to their location for comfort, causing the entire building to shudder. The Assets shared a glance and looked away. It’s going to be one of those days.

Dossiers got pushed into their hands while the injections did their work, and Soldier Alpha could not help but notice the sense of urgency; he could taste it on his tongue, sharp and metallic like tin, like a fuse that isn’t quite long enough, like the sinister feedback buzz of something very small hidden out of sight after a lengthy conversation. Alpha leafed through his dossier and skimmed the information, committing the details to memory while the technicians whispered to each other.

The mission was simple: Protect New York City, recover the Tesseract, prevent the invasion, collect information on the Avengers for a future mission. He scanned the photos of the Avengers with care, noting their strengths and weaknesses, and felt their uses slide into the beginnings of a plan, like a completed row of Tetris, the back of his brain supplied, though the Asset has never played Tetris, does not know what Tetris is.

Feeling stronger than before, Alpha set aside the dossier and pulled himself out of the chair for the technicians to dress him and once more black leather and Kevlar fold over his body. He perused the weapons table, tucking the necessary ammunition, guns and knives into the hidden holsters and pockets of the uniform. Beta stepped quietly behind him, doing the same, though his greatest weapon shifted and softly recalibrated at his left shoulder. Alpha was given no such enhancement, but he took the metal disk at the end of the table to make up for the deficit. It gleamed even in the dull warehouse light, silver in color but made of something much sturdier, a heavy comfort on his arm. A single red star occupied its center, an echo of the star on Beta’s shoulder, because they are a team, two halves of a whole, a matched set.

Another explosion rocked the building. Goggles went on, followed by the masks, and then the technicians shepherded the soldiers to their motorcycles, so shiny and new, and the Winter Soldiers took to the streets to do what they have always done: Protect the world, and kill so others may live.

 

They paused in the eye of the storm, with death raining all around them. Beta took a few moments to tap into the Avengers’ comm links so the soldiers could hear them and then Alpha loosed his disk, his shield, into the fray. It sliced through two aliens and rebounded off a third before falling faithfully into his waiting hand. 

_“Who the hell is that!?”_

Alpha could not be sure whose voice that belonged to, but he spied the archer crouching on the roof of a bus two streets down. The man, Hawkeye, glowered while he helped civilians out of the vehicle and something in Alpha’s mind settled. Civilians, who are soft and frightened, need to be removed as unpredictable variables. Beta fired into a wave of aliens swooping overhead. Whatever he missed Alpha picked off with his own handgun. He tapped his earpiece and spoke in the sure, measured tone that seemed to hypnotize flailing soldiers into doing what he told them to. Pierce called it natural leadership. The Asset would never say anything about it, but if prodded he would concede it was doing what needed to be done. The Avengers were working inefficiently and he would rectify that issue.

“Attention Avengers,” he intoned while he hailed bullets into the aliens that hadn’t moved away in time. “We are the Winter Soldiers. We are here to protect the city; our goals are the same.” He kept one ear cocked for the repulsor blast of the Iron Man suit. “We cannot allow this city to fall.”

On cue, Stark chimed in, and Alpha caught the streak of red and gold cross the sky, a giant whale-like alien ship? being? in hot pursuit. “If you got a plan we’d love to hear it!”

Alpha sprinted over a half crushed car to a cluster of aliens doing their best to destroy the Black Widow. A few well-placed whacks with his shield and a helping bullet from Beta behind him undid the knot of hostiles, and the Black Widow lowered the alien spear, winded but reluctant to show it. Hawkeye trudged toward them, slamming his bow into another hostile and kicking it to the asphalt hard enough to crunch. Lightning, localized and intense but still wild enough to rattle Alpha’s teeth in his head and send every hair follicle on end, lanced down and annihilated the incoming wave of aliens approaching. Thor, hammer in hand and blond hair only a little crusty with blood, touched down. He addressed Black Widow, “The field around the cube is impenetrable.” Alpha spared a glance at Stark Tower and the beam of blue light leading straight into the abyss where sky and cloud should be. Aliens, the Chitauri, continued to pour forth, like bees from a battered hive. He slotted the new information seamlessly into his understanding of the battle. They needed to stem the flood of aliens, they needed to eliminate the aliens already present while minimizing damages, they needed to handle civilian variables.

Black Widow stared at the destruction, the carnage, the unwavering mass of extraterrestrial army flocking the streets. “How do we do this?” she asked, not resigned to lose but resigned to fight until they won, or until they were overcome.

“As a team,” Alpha told them. A calm, confident voice amid chaos could do wonders for a fighter’s nerves, and the three Avengers turned to him, desperation badly tempered with incredulity. Alpha moved like he knew where he was going, walking backward to continue talking to them. “We have Stark as air support.” He paused at the sound a puttering motorbike drawing up to meet them and turned, easy, like he expected it, his shield arm tensed to draw back at a moment’s notice.

Doctor Banner puttered up to them in oversized trousers and a borrowed shirt, mouth twisted unhappily, glasses conspicuously missing. He dismounted and plodded up to them, sparing a quizzical glance from the Winter Soldiers to the Avengers and back. “Well this is all…horrible.”

Alpha let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding with that big, angry green piece sliding into place and touched his earpiece again. “Banner’s here.”

“About time,” Stark responded. “Tell him to suit up; I’m bringing the party to you.” They watched Stark hang a sharp right around one of the bigger skyscrapers, the leviathan trailing after him, mouth peeled wide open.

“I don’t see how that’s a party,” Black Widow muttered.

Thor turned his hammer over in his palm as the beast and Stark hurtled for them. “Dr. Banner?” Alpha breathed, “Now might be a good time to get angry.”

Something like fear flashed in his eyes, but then it was smothered with a wry kind of acceptance, because of course a dangerous-looking, faceless stranger would know about the Other Guy. “Don’t you know my secret?” he joked, bitter. He stepped out of the borrowed shoes and padded through the debris, green veins already popping along his hands, up his neck. “I’m always angry.” It sounded like a threat, or a warning, and then Banner unfolded before their eyes. Stark pulled up at the last moment and a green fist landed in the beast’s nose.

Alpha could feel its momentum, like a hundred armored tanks coming to a screaming standstill. The ground shook. Beta shifted at his back, a comforting pair of eyes and a metal arm, an extension of Alpha’s mind and body. They watched the great beast stopping, the Hulk’s feet crack the pavement under its weight, the thing’s long, long body pulling skyward and tipping, tipping, tipping forward. Stark shot something small and explosive into its body. Alpha raised his shield and kept the worst of the blast off the Black Widow, and Beta provided as much cover as possible for Hawkeye on his other side, metal arm raised. Orange and black flame licked against metal and Kevlar, and when the fire had passed, with wreckage screaming down all around them and into the neighboring streets, the Avengers and the Winter Soldiers stood in a loose circle, poised for battle and reloading.

And then more Chitauri leviathan slipped from the skyless void, deceptively soundless, making their way into the city. “Who’s going to call it?” Stark asked, and Alpha wondered to himself if the man refused to lead the team or if he did not think himself capable. Regardless, the Winter Soldier would pick up the slack.

“Our priority is containment,” he told them, once again a calm, confident voice called over the sound of twisting metal and alien firearms. “Hawkeye, I need you on that roof with eyes on everything, call out patterns and stray hostiles. Ironman, take the perimeter. Anything that gets out you herd it back our way or you eliminate it.” Stark gripped Hawkeye by the back of his shirt and launched for the aforementioned rooftop. Alpha turned to the thunder god. “Bottleneck that portal. Slow them down as much as you can.” In complete defiance of the laws of physics, Thor whirled his hammer and took to Stark Tower. The Black Widow eyed Alpha warily. “We stay on the ground and keep the fighting localized. Hulk!” The green giant snapped out of his reverie and grinned down at the Winter Soldier. “Smash!”

Black Widow at least waited until the crunch of glass and concrete abated before asking him “And what about your friend?”

“What friend?”

Mouth pursed, she turned to glare at the empty space where Beta had been standing. She looked like she had something to say but bit her tongue. Just as well; there was work to do.

 

Beta broke into Stark Tower and climbed the stairs, sliding through the evacuating mass of employees like a hand slicing through water. This was the nature of the Assets: Alpha put himself somewhere visible to do the dangerous work while Beta sneaked through the shadows to do the hard work. They were two sides of one coin—Beta was subdued where Alpha shined, Beta used cunning and charm like a scalpel where his brother in arms used earnestness and well-meaning like a bone saw. Apart they were formidable, and together they were unstoppable.

A small part of him nagged at his legs to move faster. He vaulted up the flights, heart pounding in his ears now that the last of the evacuating footsteps had fallen silent. That was also the nature of their relationship—together they were unstoppable, but apart meant Beta was missing his other half, who was out in the line of fire, being heroic and probably reckless. He ran faster.

 

Black Widow wanted to get a closer look at the portal, and the Tesseract keeping it open, which left Alpha disquieted but with the goggles and the mask no one could know. “You’re going to need a ride,” he pointed out, tinder dry, not quite inflectionless.

She rolled her eyes. “I have a ride. I could use a boost, though.”

He could cut her throat out right here, right now, and no one would be the wiser. He shuffled through his objectives for a moment while he eyed the flying Chitauri zooming above them. It was their little band of warriors against an entire army, and every pair of hands they could get would be welcome. He would help her, but he would not have to like it. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Her voice did not even wobble. “It’ll be fun.” She closed the distance between them in a mad sprint, leaping onto the hood of a car and from there to his waiting shield and he shoved hard against the two points of pressure of her boots hitting the smooth metal surface of his shield and she sailed into the line of the flying vehicles, caught one, and was gone.

“Hey Winter, there’s a bank about a block west from your position where they cornered a lot of people,” Hawkeye barked into his comm link.

“Acknowledged,” he replied and bolted for the bank. Sure enough four of the aliens blocked the exit and the people inside crouched in the dark, blood and fear and plaster dust heavy on the air stirred by their frightened whispers. He made quick work of three of them but the fourth took advantage of his unprotected six, wrapping one iron arm across his chest and catching its claws under his goggles. He elbowed it, hard, and twisted just in time for one of its not-as-dead-as-he-thought compatriots to scrabble to its feet and fire blue energy at them. The alien collapsed, taking his goggles with it and Alpha had just enough time to leap out of the window with his shield raised before the other one blasted him to pieces. He landed in the street, breathing hard, cheeks bleeding where the thing’s claws had broken the skin. He pulled himself back to his feet and shook the worst of the ringing out of his ears. All that mattered was the mission.

 

Black Widow landed with a flip and a series of rolls on the roof of Stark Tower and let her transport zip away to crash inelegantly into the side of a building. “Wish I’d thought of that,” a shadow mused. She whirled, her widow’s bites at the ready, but the Winter Soldier, the _other_ Winter Soldier, watched the skyline. He lifted a long rifle up to the hollow of his shoulder, muzzled cheek pressed to its side, and fired three quick bullets into the melee below. She watched three aliens crumple, one of them edging a little too close to Hawkeye for her liking.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

He lowered his rifle and regarded her, face hidden by goggles and muzzle, head tipped to the side while his long brown hair fluttered in the wind. “Same as you. We need to shut down this portal.”

“The scepter.”

The Winter Soldier did not startle. He walked across the roof with a stride that was quiet but heavy, like he could feel his own weight and he hated it. He paused by the sprawled figure of Erik Selvig and, to Black Widow’s surprise, knelt at his side, gun turned away and tucked under his arm. For a moment, in the smoke and destruction swallowing New York and in the wake of mind control, Selvig looked up at the faceless Asset and wilted just a little. The Winter Soldier tugged his goggles off and ran a hand through his hair—a human gesture, something people do—and addressed the frightened doctor in a low, calm tone. “What was that, sir?”

Selvig swallowed. “The energy,” he choked out. “It can’t protect against itself.”

Black Widow crouched beside him. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know what you were doing.”

Empty platitudes, Beta thought to himself and straightened, eyes trained once more on the battle below. He turned his goggles over between his fingers.

“Actually I think I did,” Selvig said. The Winter Soldier tucked his goggles into his breast pocket and fired few more bullets into the alien hordes creeping closer to Alpha’s position. “I built a failsafe into the power source.”

“Loki’s scepter,” they both say.

Selvig glanced between the spy and the assassin. “It may be able to close the portal. And I’m looking right at it.” The drop to the terrace would twist the Widow’s ankles if she landed wrong, so before she could launch herself over the lip of the roof Beta himself stepped into the empty space between point A and point B. He scooped the scepter up and tossed it lightly to the roof with his flesh hand.

 

Alpha took a bolt of blue energy to the abdomen and hit the pavement hard enough to knock the breath out of him. Thor slapped the nearest hostiles from this life into the next with his hammer and then pulled Alpha to his feet. “Ready for another bout?” the Norse god asked, smiling like people do.

Alpha gently pressed a hand to his injury and pulled it away red. “I am functional.” Although Thor nodded, his smile slipped and the Winter Soldier had the sinking suspicion he had answered incorrectly. He turned away and emptied a clip of ammunition into the next wave of adversaries and pushed the faux pas out of his mind.

 

“I can shut it down,” Black Widow said into her comm link, breathless with the tip of the scepter grazing the field around the portal. “Does anyone copy?”

“Proceed,” Alpha commanded.

“No! Wait!”

Beta could practically hear Alpha grinding his teeth. “We need to end this,” the soldier said, perfectly reasonable, unshakeable, and seething in a way none of the others could hear.

“We have a nuke coming in and it’s going to blow in less than a minute.”  Beta could hear Stark’s intake of breath. “And I know just where to put it.”

On the ground, Alpha shrugged off another attack that got within his defenses and this alien managed to crush his mask under its body when it fell. For the first time that day, perhaps for the first time in his life, he felt the breeze against his cheek. He looked up at the portal, eyes hooded. “That’s a one way trip,” he growled into the comm. On the roof of Stark Tower, Beta sighted down his rifle and took out another few hostiles. He chewed his lip behind the mask. Alpha hated losing teammates; the loss of life smacked of defeat, or worse, surrender.

Ironman did not respond. They watched him escort the nuclear explosive up into the hole in the sky and then nothing.

They waited. The Avengers and the Winter Soldiers watched the rip in the sky, but when Stark did not reappear. “Proceed, Black Widow,” Alpha ordered.

She hesitated one moment more, looking small with her pale hands wrapped around the scepter. “Close it down, Natalia,” Beta told her. She startled and then shoved the scepter through the field and the beam of light dissolved, the portal with it. “Stark is incoming,” Beta reported when a red and gold figure dropped through the shredded sky before it knitted back together. Ironman tumbled end over end.

Down on the ground, squinting into the light without the aid of his goggles, Alpha noted the way Stark seemed to be reaching terminal velocity. “Ah,” he said, dismayed and unhappy, more a breath than a vocalization. On his left Thor spun his hammer, but the Hulk beat him to the punch by launching himself into Ironman and careening down the side of a skyscraper. Glass shattered under green fingernails, the destruction unheeded as Hulk made his way to ground level and, once there, gently deposited the metal form on the cracked asphalt.

Hulk, Thor and Alpha crowded beside Stark. Thor discarded his gold face plate and scowled. “He’s not breathing!” he glowered at the rest of the suit and for one insane moment Alpha imagined someone trying to perform chest compressions through the metal shell encasing his body.

This did not sit well with the Hulk, who gave an ear shattering bellow that seemed to alarm Stark back into living, or at least breathing and talking. His brown eyes rolled in his face. “What the hell? What just happened?” he babbled. He lifted his head from the ground and let it thunk back on the pavement. “Please tell me nobody kissed me.”

Alpha cast around for a moment, taking in the burning buildings, the stink of carnage and melting metal, the smoke drifting almost lazily across the sky. “We accomplished the mission,” he sighed.

“Yay,” Stark warbled, because he was incapable of not using his face to produce language. “Good job team. You too, tall dark and creepy.” Stark frowned in Alpha’s direction, his eyes not quite focused properly. “Let’s take a day tomorrow.” Alpha straightened from his crouch, mentally cataloguing his injuries to speed the maintenance process along. “Have you ever had shawarma?” He was still talking, apparently. “I’ve never had it, but I want to try it. There’s a shawarma joint not far from here.”

“We still have work to do,” Thor reminded him.

“Agreed,” Alpha said. The two of them were able to get Stark more or less upright again, then it was just a matter of making it to the tower.

 

The Black Widow and Beta joined them there, and if Alpha found breathing a little easier with the other Winter Soldier once again at his back, he will call it coincidence. “So do you have names or something?” Stark wondered.

“No,” Beta says about the same time Alpha said “Yes.” They exchanged a look and looked away. “That information is classified,” Alpha amended smoothly.

Some soft part of him, a part that had not been shattered or fried and cut out of him yet, some soft part of him knew Beta had a name once. Beta had a name, a good name, a name that fit him like a glove, that rolled off the tongue, a name like a person would have. Somewhere along the line it got forgotten by both of them, but Alpha keeps an eye out, knowing he would recognize it at once were he to come across it. Himself though, Alpha didn’t think he ever had a name for himself. He wasn’t a someone before being commissioned, not like Beta was.

They secured Loki in a cell that Thor assured them would hold him, and the Tesseract in a different container. Alpha talked and cajoled with them while Beta marked its passage in his mind for retrieval later. Selvig used a piece of rebar he found to batter the rest of the portal opening apparatus until it was so much debris.

And then the Avengers went to eat shawarma, with the Winter Soldiers in tow because Stark kept waving his hands and saying “I insist!” and besides, they needed to gather intel about them, anyway. At the table Beta tucked his mask into one of the folds of his Kevlar vest and slouched over his plate. Stark sat across from the soldiers, not talking for once, probably because his mouth was full. Black Widow and Hawkeye shared a seat, the former watching the Winter Soldiers suspiciously while the latter glared at his plate despondently. Banner seemed ready to curl in on himself. Thor ate like this was the second part of the battle, all gusto and forward momentum and just an edge of anger.

Beta pushed a glass of water at Alpha with a look. Alpha’s lips were chapped—one of the first signs of dehydration—but the man just blinked at the glass like he had never seen one before and scooted it back toward Beta. Who scooted it back at Alpha.

“What are you two doing over there?” Hawkeye demanded.

Alpha dropped his hand under the table. “Nothing.”

“Drink it,” Beta ordered.

“You drink it. I’m fine. I have my own water right here.”

“Drink that one then. You need to take in fluids.”

“I can maintain myself,” Alpha replied coolly, feeling the eyes of the group drill into him. His ears heated but he pushed the residual embarrassment down.

“You do a poor job of it,” Beta grumbled under his breath. And that is how Alpha hip checked the other Asset out of his chair. “I will fight you!” Beta snapped from where he sat on the floor.

 

The Winter Soldiers trudged out of the shawarma restaurant no worse for ware, though the owner had seemed a little ruffled to see two black-clad non-Avengers roughhousing on the floor while Stark attempted to begin a betting pool and Thor piled what was left of their meals on his plate. They picked their way through the shadows, the crackle and buzz of a job well done sneaking under their skins. Or maybe that was the signal disruptor Alpha had turned on when they stepped back into the war torn streets.

It did not matter. They had hours before they could collect the Tesseract, and they had protected the city, prevented an alien invasion and gathered valuable intel on the Avengers. Beta’s back thudded against the alley wall, solid under Alpha’s palms. “You did good work today, soldier.”

Beta stared up into Alpha’s face, lips parted. “Thank you, sir.”

“We make a valuable team, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We are more powerful together than apart.”

“Yes.”

Alpha’s lips were still chapped when they brushed against Beta’s. Alpha curled his fingers into Beta’s long, brown hair and Beta dug his fingers into the straps of the other’s uniform. It was some minutes before they parted, lips spit slick and bitten red, eyes glassy and dark. Beta blinked and pushed Alpha away. “You require maintenance.”

“You require maintenance,” Alpha shot back, and grinned at Beta, all teeth and squinting through his eyelashes. 

 

“Anyone else think that shield of Mission Impossible’s was familiar?” Tony asked when he dropped his credit card on the table.

Clint ran a tired hand over his face. “What now, Stark?”

“Do you have any idea who the Winter Soldier is?” Natasha shot back.

“Nope. Should I?” Tony replied.

“He’s the boogey man of the intelligence community.”

“Oh really, because he looks an awful lot like Captain Fucking America to me.” Clint sat up at that, and Bruce stirred from his food-induced stupor.

“I never knew there were two Winter Soldiers,” Natasha mused. She knocked back the last of her water, looking like she wished it was something stronger. “I trained under the dark-haired one, when I was small.”

Tony’s face twitched. “Wow. That explains a lot, actually.”

“They’re not Captain America. That’s stupid,” Clint dismissed out of hand. “He’s been dead for, like, seventy years or something.”

Tony leaned on his elbow, one eyebrow raised. “We just fought an alien invasion and the man next to you turns into a giant green rage monster. Me thinks there is more in this life than is dreamt of in your philosophy, or however that line goes.”

“We have a bigger problem than zombies, or whatever you were going to suggest,” Natasha stated. “The Winter Soldier is a Hydra operative, or so the rumor goes. Which means that Hydra wants the Tesseract in a bad way.”

“Maybe Hydra just wanted to save the world,” Bruce offered.

“I don’t think so, big guy,” Tony sighed. “There’s not enough booze here to deal with this. Let’s get back to the Tower—I think I have a war room in there with a fully stocked wet bar.”

“I think I’ll sit this one out,” Bruce replied.

“I think we all need a shower and a nap,” Clint supplied, and at least on that front they were all in agreement.


	2. The First and Last Mission, or The Beginning of the Rest of their Lives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Ah,” he murmured. It was more a breath than an utterance, undetectable to someone without enhanced hearing, but it was a sound with inflections. It was a sound that carried the weight of gross resignation with it—not the resignation of dying after a long fight, but the resignation that comes with knowing that dying was not an option. It was the sound of a man who realized he needed to find his shield so he could pin Fury to a wall and make him eat it.

The Assets were more useable together than apart. Although the many heads of Hydra speculated about the good they could do as individual units, the practice of separating the soldiers unerringly failed to produce the same quality of work they did as a two-part whole. Apart, the Assets became despondent, irrational, disobedient and overall troublesome. A training tour in the Soviet Union conducted by Beta had resulted in strange personality aberrations and the Red Room eventually losing one of its most prized assets. A straightforward assassination in Somalia turned into a two-week manhunt when Alpha left his safe house for a perimeter sweep and failed to check in.

Ah, but together was a different story. Together, things got done. If Alpha lost his nerve, as he did for the Stark job and the Kennedy job, Beta could pick up the slack and put bullets where they needed to go. If Beta got uppity and started putting his metal fist through perfectly good technicians and agents, Alpha would curtail his behavior without prompting. Alone on missions, it was a coin toss if they would check in or simply fall off the grid for a spell. But together they always arrived for extraction at the appointed time, like clockwork. Alone, they might protect a base of operations or they might raze it to the ground, but together they remained compliant, docile even.

And that did not even cover their field work. They had achieved some kind of low level telepathy and could communicate with nothing more than a twitch of eyebrows or a head tipped 15 degrees to one side. They moved like dancers through hostiles, leaving a veritable graveyard of blood and clean deaths in their wake. They had once brought an entire anarchic regime to heel with nothing more than the military equivalent of paperclips, chewing gum and a charred newspaper. They were not often given missions that relied on subtlety or espionage, but when they were they needed to be placed in the field together. Alpha was naturally likeable, with a low-key sweetness that resurfaced regardless of how many volts they exposed him to. Targets practically threw their trust at him, and he made them feel safe, wanted, good, right before he twisted their heads at an unhealthy angle. The man could not lie worth a damn, but a session of coaching could have him actually believe he was the son of a wealthy ambassador/oil tycoon/weapons manufacturer. And Beta was charming. While Alpha did not have an ounce of guile in his being, Beta had it in spades, and he could lie and play a part with the best of them. If Alpha was the gentle confidante, then Beta was the salacious honeypot. Left to his own devices, two women would wind up in his bed on his missions, usually at the same time, which was another reason he needed Alpha at his back.  

For this mission, the Assets were together, and they enjoyed a longer leash as a result. They parked their motorcycles two blocks away from the Hydra safe house and performed a perimeter sweep before stealing inside. It might have been an automotive repair shop some years previous, but the years of vacancy left a blanket of dust over the surfaces and the floor, and most of the machinery either left with the previous owner or left in the hands of vandals turned thieves. Hydra provided them with cash, soap, provisions, a change of clothes, tools for weapon maintenance, supplies for Asset maintenance. Beta breathed a sigh of relief when the dingy shower head in the bathroom in the far back gurgled and sputtered to life.

They showered in silence, and then they tended each other’s wounds—a few mild abrasions and bruises on Beta but Alpha looked like something the cat dragged in. “For someone with a shield you take an amazing amount of damage,” he groused, plying a wad of gauze to Alpha’s abdomen.

“Damage is within acceptable parameters,” he reasoned.

“Acceptable within parameters so long as it does not impede function.” Beta prodded the man in the chest. “The extent of damage is still excessive, taking into account you have a goddamn shield you insist of throwing around.”

Alpha put on his wounded face. “It is so much more satisfying than bullets.”

Beta washed the blood off his hands, careful to scrub soap between metal plates as well as under fingernails. “The Winter Soldier does not express preferences,” he said at the wall where a mirror should be.

“The Winter Soldier does not express preferences,” Alpha echoed. He picked up one of the many knives cluttering the counter and turned it between his fingers. Beta watched him for a moment, noted the battered, scarred handle, the minute scratch down the steel blade, and narrowed his eyes.

“That,” he stated, jabbing a metal index finger at the knife, “is a good weapon and nothing more.” Alpha said nothing, only continued turning the blade over and over. “I cannot help it if it keeps ending up in my left hip sheath where it is easiest to reach, and that the knife may or may not reappear from mission to mission.” He pursed his lips. “And I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”

Alpha set the knife down with a sigh. He rifled through their provisions and tossed the other soldier a pair of nutrition bars. The things tasted like cardboard and nearly snapped one’s teeth in the process of chewing, but each one contained approximately 1,000 calories so they demolished them when the need for sustenance outweighed the risk of losing molars. “This is our first mission,” Alpha murmured, apropos to nothing.  

“This is our last mission.” Beta crumpled the wrapper of his meal and started in on the second bar. They kept no memories of previous mission, but the scars on both of their bodies told them there must have been previous forays to protect the world. Still, their brains bore a catalog of how a mission unfolds: thaw, briefing, fieldwork, accomplish the mission (failure existed well outside acceptable parameters), return to base for any follow ups. And then the Chair, with its blinding white pain stealing away memories of the mission, of themselves, of the bleeding covers they had previously used. And then back to cryo to sleep, dreamless, caught between death and life, a stretch of nonexistence in which years will pass. This is their first mission, reborn when they were peeled from their tanks, and this is their last mission, dying when the straps of the Chairs close over their sweating limbs and kill their thoughts, their memories.

And then they will awaken, perhaps a hundred years in the future, and they will know each other, the way a blind man who has never seen a mirror still knows his own face. And the shield with its red star will be on the weapons table on one end, and the knife with the battered hilt and scratched blade will be on the other, and it will be their first mission again. And their last.

Alpha glanced at the clock on the wall, another leaving of Hydra’s. “We have four hours before we retrieve the Tesseract. Get some sleep.”

Beta unrolled his bedroll and stretched out on it to stare at the water spotted ceiling and wish there were stars to stare at instead. Alpha unpacked his own bedroll beside him and unfolded on the hard floor. They closed their eyes. And they dreamed.

 

“Christ on a cracker,” Tony muttered at his tablet. Natasha walked out of the adjoining living room, a towel still wrapped around her hair and frowned at him. He turned the tablet around. “The guy on the left look familiar to you?”

“Vanya,” she answered. “I take it the man beside him is your Captain America?”

“The same,” he sighed, and scrubbed a hand over his eyes. Clint snored quietly on the couch on the other end of the room, and Bruce curled up in the armchair, a mug of tea gone cold on the table beside him. Thor slouched on the second couch, drifting in an uncomfortable, unhappy sleep.

Tony set his tablet aside and knuckled at his eyes. “It looks like Captain America and his favorite sidekick Bucky Barnes got picked up by Hydra after they were supposed to die. What I don’t get is how they got conned into doing Hydra’s dirty work.”

Natasha fixed him with her sad but knowing frown. “They have their methods. I doubt there’s anything of your Captain and your Barnes left in the Winter Soldiers. If they’ve been active for the past seventy years, their personalities and memories have probably been wiped so many times all that’s left is the mission imperative and muscle memory.”

“Hail Hydra,” Tony cursed. “And you think they’re going to break into the tower to take the Tesseract?”

“I know they will. And they’re going to be familiar with our fighting styles, which makes them even more dangerous.”

“Okay, but I’m not going to murder Captain Goddamn America.” Tony shuddered. “I grew up on stories about the bastard, for crying out loud. My old man never did stop searching for him.”

“When the time comes we have to do what needs to be done.” She had steel in her voice. Tony hated it.

“And what about Barnes, or Vanya you called him?”

To her credit, her face didn’t change one iota. “He was…a good thing in a very bad place,” she told him. “He refined the skills that made me so valuable, and then he helped me get out of the Red Room. If he can be saved…if they can be rehabilitated, then I would go that route. But I don’t think that’s an option, Stark.”

“You got out.”

She rolled her eyes. “I was young then. And I was brainwashed but I wasn’t consistently wiped after every mission. And I had the Winter Soldier in my corner, and later Clint and Coulson. Don’t give me that look; if they can be saved, then we’ll do it. But if they try to walk out with the Tesseract... if they try to kill us and it looks like they’ll succeed, then I will put them both down. By myself if I have to.”

“Yeah yeah I get it Romanoff. Let me make some calls. And some coffee.”

 

Alpha drifted awake to the sound of steady breathing and the familiar warmth of Beta against his back, flesh arm thrown over his middle. He blinked the dream of rushing ice water and broken glass out of his memory and pushed himself into a sitting position gingerly. For a moment, Beta’s arm tightened across his ribs and then the other man awoke with a snuffle. They dressed into their tactical gear, checked and loaded their guns, pushed knives into sheaths, wiped down any and all surfaces to eliminate fingerprints. They stretched, went over the mission again. For a moment they stood under the fluorescent lighting of the abandoned automotive repair shop turned Hydra safe house and, knowing this to be their last chance before the Chair or the Avengers destroyed them, shared a final kiss at the door. Alpha pulled away slowly, Beta’s face still cradled between his oversized palms. For a brief, insane moment, he entertained the idea of leaning back in for another kiss, which would lead to another and another. They could kiss until dawn broke, until the mission failed, until Hydra appeared to return them to base for the mandatory correction and reprogramming. Alpha has been obedient for his entire lifetime, a lifetime contained in a single day, but if he were to err he would err for Beta. He let his hands fall to his sides and stepped away. Goggles went on. Masks went on. They rode their motorcycles into the night.

Once at the tower with their accompaniment of a Hydra Strike team, the Winter Soldiers parted into their accustomed roles: Beta broke into the building to collect the Tesseract, and Alpha made himself such a loud nuisance that the Avengers had no choice but to engage him. That’s about when the mission went from dicey to absolutely FUBAR.

“The cube has been relocated,” Beta growled into his comm. He tore through the room, through the glass case the Tesseract had been stored in mere hours previous, through the other locked cases containing the kind of technology and information AIM or Baron Von Doom would sell their kidneys for. Nothing. He trudged down to the cell Loki waited in and glared through the buzzing glass. “And you haven’t seen it, I presume.” The alien raised an eyebrow at him and raised his bound hands. Nothing. Beta ground his teeth.

“The cube has been relocated,” he said into the comm again. This time static answered him. His gut clenched. “Alpha, report.” Nothing.

His heart seized in his chest around the same time an innocuous aperture in the ceiling he mistook for a security camera fired something blue straight into his face. An inky substance spread over the goggles, blanking out his vision, spattering across his forehead, into his hair, burning into the delicate skin around his eyes. He staggered back, gun raised and squeezed the trigger but another blue projectile caught him in the neck and he went down.

 

Alpha awoke with a start, strapped to a white bed in a white room. He coughed weakly, noting his cracked ribs and the taste of blood on his tongue. Given the gross lack of SHIELD involvement in the alien invasion, he had not taken into account their involvement with the Tesseract, or the possibility of their presence at Stark Tower. He took stock of the room, willing away the cobwebs in his skull. No windows as far as he could see, the door appeared to be made of steel, as were the thick manacles at his wrists and ankles keeping him bedbound. The ceiling appeared to be the same white texture of the floor, and lacking in sturdy beams from which chains and an unhappy Alpha could be hung. There was an island, solid white like the walls, secured to the floor near the center of the cell; its countertop was smooth and not quite long or wide enough to lay a body on it reliably, but it had drawers with locks flush to the vertical surface where scalpels, toxins and psychotropic drugs could be stored between uses. The cell was relatively large, maybe fifteen feet by fifteen feet, and designed for holding him (or people like him).

He craned his neck to look down himself. His chest was mottled black with bruises, with inky blue spattered here and there. It stained the sheets. He fuzzily recalled making a nuisance of himself to attract enemy fire from his team, only to find no bullets but blue projectiles, obviously meant to incapacitate more than kill.

They had taken his comm unit from his ear, and he was naked under the thin white sheet someone had stretched over him. And Beta had probably been captured as well, was probably in a cell much less nice than this one, strapped to a metal examination table and being picked apart by some bastard. Alpha chewed this over for a long moment.

“Ah,” he murmured. It was more a breath than an utterance, undetectable to someone without enhanced hearing, but it was a sound with inflections. It was a sound that carried the weight of gross resignation with it—not the resignation of dying after a long fight, but the resignation that comes with knowing that dying was not an option. It was the sound of a man who was going to have to wade through dead bodies buck ass nude and still covered in blue ink. It was the sound of a man who was going to have to raze the entire complex, SHIELD base or Stark tower, it didn’t matter, while looking for Beta. It was the sound of a man who realized he needed to find his shield so he could pin Fury to a wall and make him eat it. And then he was going to find the Tesseract, hand it off to Pierce, and take correction for untimely mission parameters.

He struggled against the bindings for a minute or so before gritting his teeth and yanking hard on his left arm until the wrist dislocated and he could pull his hand out. He popped the bones back into place and let the hot pain ground him. Then he slid his fingers into his yellow hair and pulled out the bobby pin—a trick he must have picked up on a previous mission that became a habit, one even Hydra didn’t know about. This he slid into the locks and jimmied until his other wrist and his ankles were free. Then, hearing the distant thunder of booted feet on the floor outside, he beat the living hell out of the bedframe until one of the legs came free. It was flimsy—probably more aluminum than steel—but it would serve its purpose.  

“Captain Rogers,” a disembodied voice admonished from the ceiling. Genteel and vaguely British, Alpha registered. “Captain Rogers, you appear to be in distress.”

He frowned at the steel door. Of course, if no one came through it he would have no one to beat to death and he would be stuck in here until some poor soul took the plunge. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. The bolts appeared too sturdy even for his might to take them apart, but they had to feed him at some point, or else just let him starve to death, and he would be ready.

“Captain Rogers,” the voice repeated, “please put down the weapon.” Fat chance of that. His ears twitched, and the name seemed to ping some kind of recognition in the dusty recesses of his memory. A cover, he concluded. An old cover, one he must have used for a military-related mission. Whoever captured him had old intel but well-built doors. 

“Captain Rogers, you are in no danger,” the disembodied voice lied. “You are currently being held in the SHIELD base in New York City. You have sustained considerable injuries to your ribs, your left hip, and most recently your left wrist. Do you desire medical attention?”

Oh yes, medical attention would come for him alright. They would probably strap him to the metal table still tacky with Beta’s blood and just dive right in. “No,” he snapped, knowing it will be ignored but he was never good at knowing when to give up the good fight. “I would like to know the location of Winter Soldier designation: Beta.”

To their credit, the voice did not so much as pause. “Sergeant Barnes is currently in a secondary holding cell recovering from two concentrated doses of ICER ammunition, also on the SHIELD base campus. He appears to be lucid and quite vocal; would you like to speak with him?”

Alpha eyed the door. Barnes also pinged some recognition; they must have completed a military op together at some point. “Confirmed.”

The hidden speaker in the ceiling rustled as if with static and then he heard the unmistakable growl of Beta. “Winter Soldier report,” Alpha barked.

“Status: Damage within acceptable parameters,” Beta replied, voice oddly echoing across the room. The tension leaking out of Alpha’s shoulders was pure coincidence. “Asset maintains partial functionality: left arm nonfunctional, but apparently intact. I’m naked and strapped to a white bed. Cell location: unknown.” Beta took a breath. “Winter Soldier report.”

“Status: Damage within acceptable parameters,” Alpha all but sighed. “Asset maintains full functionality. The same cannot be said for the bed. Also naked, but successful in brawl with the bed. Cell location: unknown.”

A Russian curse floated over the speakers. “Only you can get into a fist fight with a bed.”

“Confirmed.”

When an hour had passed and no one came to the door, Alpha resigned himself to a long vigil on the other side of the room, lining up the remains of the bed and mattress as a makeshift bivouac. Every thirty minutes or so he would glance at the ceiling. “Check in.”

“Still here,” Beta assured him, solid, a buoy in a stormy harbor. “I will inform you if I am being moved,” he said after the fourth time Alpha demanded a check in, as if the audio would not be cut out the moment they would come. And they will come.

Alpha leaned back against the white wall in his white room, ribs and wrist and hip aching dully while his skin crawled. He nodded off periodically, and then he would snap to attention. “Check in.”

“Still here,” came the sleepy reply. “Still stable.”

 

“Sir?”

“What now, JARVIS?” Tony worried over the innards of what used to be a toaster in the SHIELD break room. There are people who idle well, but Tony Stark was not one of them. He should just go home, tinker in his lab, catch an hour or two of sleep, but the thought of trekking through the charred remains of Manhattan did not especially appeal. And he suspected that the Winter Soldiers would mysteriously disappear when his back was turned. They made Fury itchy.

“Sir, I have detected a pattern regarding Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes’ relationship.”

“Aw, never knew you were a big softie, JARVIS.”

“Quite,” his AI replied. “I predict that without immediate action SHIELD agent casualties will increase dramatically over time.”

Tony frowned and delicately pushed one wire over another on the table. “Okay; hit me.”

“It would appear that before becoming entangled with Hydra, Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes were very close and rarely apart. The few documented instances of them being forcibly separated have resulted in: Captain Rogers consenting to Dr. Erskine’s experiment that would make him Captain America, Captain Rogers attacking a Hydra prison camp singlehandedly, and finally Captain Rogers flying the _Valkyrie_ into the Atlantic Ocean.”

Tony’s face twitched. “That sounds about right. What are you saying, JARVIS?”

“Captain Rogers engages in short-sighted, poorly planned, irrational acts without Sergeant Barnes as a stabilizing influence. Upon waking an hour ago he proceeded to dislocate his wrist, extricate himself from his bonds despite preexisting injuries, and dismantle his bed. I currently have an audio relay between his cell and Sergeant Barnes’ cell, and the Captain has demanded check in four times now. Judging by his behavior, the next person to enter his cell will be beaten to death. The immediate course of action should be to place both soldiers into one cell.”

“We can’t put those maniacs together,” Tony squawked.  “Can you imagine the damage they could do? And how could I even transport one to the other without getting someone’s fist through my throat?”

“Might I remind you that Sergeant Barnes is still secured to his bed?”

Tony rubbed at a smattering of crumbs on the table. “Okay, point. But there is no way Hill or Fury is going to go for this.”

As if on cue Fury stormed into the room, his eyepatch managing to look just as murderous as his eye. “Stark! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Tony blinked at him, then at the mangled pile of hardware that was a toaster that morning. He conscientiously gathered up the metal bits into a pile and draped an unfolded napkin over them. “Nothing?” he hazarded.

“Why is your AI in my building?”

“I think the real question is why my AI _wouldn’t_ be in your building. I think all buildings would benefit from having JARVIS installed into them. Coincidentally did you need something, Nick? Was kinda in the middle of something.”

“I just got an email saying we should put the Winter Soldiers in the same room, and I’m beginning to think you had something to do with it.”

“What! _Moi_?” Tony gasped, planting his hand over the hard shell of his arc reactor. “I am an innocent! And you’re welcome, by the way. You know, for saving the world from aliens and for helping put away Mayhem and Havoc. Oh yeah, and for putting that nuclear bomb into space. Really, no thanks necessary. Doing good is its own reward.”

“Can it, Stark,” Fury growled.

Tony was never good at following orders. “And what are you planning to do with Rogers and Barnes anyway? They can’t live their lives underground in a SHIELD base.” Afghanistan itched in the back of his skull, and he knew SHIELD wasn’t exactly above using torture to make a pair of soviet super soldiers cooperate with whatever they had planned.

“It’s none of your business.”

And for all his skills with reading and manipulating people, Fury didn’t even know the landmine he had just stomped on. With five little words the Winter Soldiers became very much Tony Stark’s business, and he had a way with business. He smiled at the director, all teeth. “Actually, I rather think it is. See, you have a pair of brainwashed prisoners of war, and we both know they can’t just disappear; the media would throw a fit.”

“The media.”

“Oh yes.” Tony toyed with part of the plastic casing that had been a toaster. “It would be a real shame if that story went public, especially in light of SHIELD’s distinct noninvolvement with the Chitauri invasion, except for at the end when a missile came to wipe out New York. There’s already buzz about who the masked fighters were. Sure, people think they’re Avengers for now, but what about tomorrow? Risky business, Nick.

“So really, what’s our play? They can’t live in your basement eating Cheetos and playing WOW, they can’t fall off the face of the Earth, and for all your toys and agents you’re too scared to relocate one soldier into a cell with the other.”

“No one wants to lock them up or put them down,” Fury assured him with forced patience. “We’re going to rehabilitate them.”

“So what you really mean is that you’re going to tell them that SHIELD was really the good guys all along and then you’re going to, what, air drop them in Bosnia or Sokovia or Wakanda and have them do your dirty work instead of Hydra’s?” The brittle plastic case creaked ominously in his hand and he set it down on the table. “You know, something like that happened to me once, and it didn’t end well for my captors.”

“We’re not—“

“Don’t you dare. Lie to yourself all you want, Nick, but don’t lie to me like I’m stupid. No amount of Stockholm syndrome is going to save you when they realize what’s been done to them, what you’re trying to do to them again. And you better be ready when it hits the fan because this game you’re playing can go very sideways very fast.” His phone buzzed in his pocket and he got up from the table, clenching his hands to make them look steady. “Pepper’s calling.” He brushed past Fury and ducked into the hallway, pressing his phone to his ear with a frown. “Hi honey! Didja miss me?”

“Shut up, Stark,” Natasha replied, her tone brisk enough he only imagined her nearly-not-a-smile on the other end. He let himself imagine it nonetheless.

“What’s up, buttercup?”

“We dismantled the warehouse they had been keeping them in before the invasions,” she told him. “I was able to download some files before the databanks melted. JARVIS should be able to access them in the next minute or two.” She took in a breath. “It doesn’t look good, Tony.”

“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know. Just got done talking with Fury. We had a nice heart-to-heart about Pain and Panic here and it sounds like he wants to rehabilitate them, which basically translates to putting a SHIELD logo on their tac gear over the stupid red octopus and then set them loose to keep killing.”

“He wants to reprogram them.” Natasha’s voice never wavered; she sounded steady and strong, but he could just make out an edge of anger. He never asked about her history, didn’t know anything about the “Red Room” but if he had to guess he would say this just got personal for her in a big way.

“Where are you?”

“Still in the state, but not for long. We’re going to see Thor and Loki off tomorrow and then I’m headed for DC to see what I can dig up and Clint’s going abroad.”

“You really think we should all be splitting up right now?”

“There’s information in the States that we can use, and Clint needs to get away. Let’s just say that after the whole Loki fiasco this continent isn’t a safe place for him.”

“That bad?”

“I’m going to join him in a couple weeks,” she breezed over him. “Don’t tell me you’re worried, Stark.”

He snorted. “I remember that report about me you wrote. We both know I don’t play nice with others. It looks like I’m going to be too busy here to even think about you and Legolas. I got a company to run, PR is going to make me do a press conference of some sort, I have a pair of amnesiac assassins to babysit, a tower to pretty much rebuild and I think I need to replace the toaster in your break room.”

“Fantastic,” Natasha replied. “I’ll be in touch.” The line went dead in his ear and he leaned against the wall with a sigh.


	3. To Dream of Electric Sheep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tactical gear goes on and he selects his weapons. The shield goes on his arm and he finds himself tracing the red star in the center with a gloved fingertip. The room falls deathly silent. He thinks of a matching star and the rage of mountainous winter wind and the sense that his left arm has been forcibly detached from the rest of him, though it hangs warm and solid from his shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some unpleasantness described in more detail than I typically post. Some low key torture happens to the protagonist; read italicized sections with caution.

Alpha slept with his back to the wall and his hands wrapped around his makeshift club, and his eyes darted back and forth behind his eyelids, and he dreamed. He dreamed of his target, an old target, a dead target, but in his mind’s eye the mission still breathed and smiled and drank copper colored whiskey. And he dreamed, or perhaps he remembered, he dreamed that the soft part of him that no amount of correction or coaching or voltage could eke out of him spied the target from its uneasy place in the dusty recesses of his soul. And he dreamed that the soft but tenacious part of him screamed and screamed even after the blood was washed out from under his fingernails and the pools of red had begun to turn brown at the edges and tacky in the middle.

“Captain Rogers?” British and genteel, but for a moment the words were ragged, twisted Bantu and French and incomprehensible besides.

“Check in,” he rasped past the burning in his chest.

“Still here,” came Beta’s faithful response.

“Captain Rogers, Mr. Stark will be entering shortly to give you breakfast and he would appreciate it if you refrained from attacking him while he did so,” the British voice told him. “At this time I am afraid you will not be permitted to freely walk the base or to leave. Extensive measures are being taken to ensure your compliance.”

Alpha did not say anything, nor indicate he heard or understood the voice. But he did gather himself up and got to his feet stiffly, hand wrapped loosely around his crude metal club. And Stark did come, dressed in the Ironman armor sans the face plate, a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of water balanced on one gauntlet and a manila folder clenched in the other. Alpha watched the way the door pulled open in increments, only wide enough for Stark to pass through, and then pull shut behind him of its own accord. There was a gray foyer behind it, and doubtless a duplicate door, both probably operated by a third party, someone who had eyes and ears on the cell. Perhaps the genteel British man, but then, perhaps not.

And of course Stark spoke before he was more than two steps inside the cell. “Fury and I don’t agree on much, but we do agree that you need some looking after, Cap. And what can I say? I’m a jack-of-all-trades. Alien invasions, surveillance, room service, Candy Crush, I do it all.” He set the platter on the island near the middle of the cell. “Bon appetit.” Alpha was loath to come near the island, but he eyed the sandwiches and water while he debated with himself. Stark dropped the slightly rumpled manila folder beside the platter and tromped halfway across the room, fists on his hips while he surveyed Alpha’s makeshift bivouac. “You know, this is why we can’t have nice things.”

When he turned back, Alpha already had the platter and the water and leaned against the opposite wall of the room, a safe distance from both the little counter island and the Ironman armor.

He ate like an animal. It would have been funny in any other context, but every single movement he made held the promise of violence. He tore through the six sandwiches Stark put together like a sickle through wheat: methodically, thoroughly and quickly. And his eyes never left Ironman.

“Right,” Stark said, drawing out the single syllable for an improbably long time. “I’m going to see if I can scrounge up something for you to wear that you’re not going to turn into a weapon. Maybe yoga pants or something. You’re giving me a chill just looking at you. Um, in the meantime I left you some reading material.” Dead blue eyes followed him as he walked back to the counter and patted the manila envelope. “And don’t worry about your partner in crime, Slim Pickins; we’re feeding him and keeping him comfortable as much as we can, same as you. So. Yeah.” Tony left the cell, trying not to feel the prickle of his hair standing on end while the Winter Soldier watched him. “No wonder they put goggles on him,” he muttered to himself. “Jeepers creepers.”

After he left, Alpha counted a hundred heartbeats before he approached the counter and the envelope resting on top of it. He took it to his makeshift bivouac, knelt on the floor and opened it carefully. Just papers inside, so he upended the package and let the documents scatter on the floor. He arranged the documents in a loose half circle before he picked up the first one and skimmed the text.

SHIELD was operating on old intel, and it was faulty besides. All the documents concerned Captain America and Steve Rogers, with the line between the icon and the man blurred to the point of nonexistence. These were Alpha’s first covers—identities that predated all others. He scrutinized the photos adjoining the articles and write-ups, and pursed his lips. A good likeness, he decided as he ran his eyes over sepia toned photographs, but perhaps not as subtle as he would have liked. On the other hand, it was his first cover; he must not have learned the arts of discretion. He could only imagine the way his handlers would take him apart if he joined a chorus line and sold war bonds today. Then again, perhaps they had.

He picked up a yellow newspaper article, old but in good condition from sitting protected in a file for seventy years. And then he put it back down again because he had read it before, before it had become yellow with age, before it had become a piece of history.

_He comes to in a stiff cot in a dim room, dressed in a thin cotton shirt and gray slacks, bound to a bed with unbreakable manacles. He opens his eyes to silence, gray walls, gray floor, gray ceiling, a single naked bulb set in the ceiling. What he remembers best is the cold, sinking into his bones, sapping the heat from his skin. Underground, he thinks just before the door opens and a well-dressed gentleman enters the room, accompanied by four armed guards. The Captain, for he was the Captain then, glares from his repose, too weak to fight but willing to give it a shot anyway. The armed ensemble relocates him from the bed to the table, and he puts up a brief but ineffectual struggle, and earns a black eye and a punch to the throat for his efforts. They cuff him to the table, directly across from the well-dressed stranger, who regards him with bright eyes and a knowing smile._

_“Well done, you. You performed better than our wildest dreams. Look on your good work and rejoice.” The man sets the newspaper before him, and he reads the text numbly. Captain America Believed Dead, the headline screams._

_“Well it’s wrong,” he growls past a throat that feels it has never known water before. “I’m still kickin’ and it’s only a matter of time before I get out of here.”_

_The stranger frowns, bewildered. “Ah, you are confused, my dear Soldier. It seems you are prone to confusing yourself with your covers—a hiccup in the programming we shall soon rectify. Listen to me very carefully.”_

_“Go to hell!”_

_A guard brings his baton down hard on the Captain’s shoulder. “As I was saying,” the stranger sighs. “Really, this would go so much easier if you would just listen and comply. Captain America was a cover for you and nothing more. You work for the glory of Hydra; you always have. Your work selling war bonds, while irregular, helped fund the greatest wartime advances in Hydra technology. Your misadventures on the warfront were completely of your own devising, but it ensured the genesis and development of the second of your kind.”_

_“What the hell are you talking about?” he sputters. The baton comes down on his should again, this time with a definitive cracking noise and he looses a yelp._

_“This is how it so often is when an only child becomes a big brother,” the stranger chortles. “Unfortunately you destroyed the Valkyrie and its cargo, but you did manage to pave the way for the Red Skull’s successor, so Hydra may overlook that little malfeasance.”_

_“Bite me.” He waits for the baton to come down again, but the man waves off the guard._

_“My dear Soldier, you are terribly confused, but I am nothing if not forgiving. We will repair you and make you even better than before. You will change the world for the better. This will be easier if you do as you are ordered. Now, repeat after me: I am not Captain America. Captain America was a cover, and is dead. Go on.”_

It took three failed escape attempts, two weeks of starvation, two sessions of chemical therapy, innumerable beatings and two interactions with the Chair before Alpha realized that all his memories were implanted, and that he had forgotten his mission in the midst of playing Captain America. Thankfully, Lukin was patient with him and guided him every step of the way, going so far as to call on the Winter Soldier designation: Beta to collaborate the truth. Things were easier once he learned to comply; he was allowed on some solo missions and occasionally oversaw Beta’s missions and things really did get better when he quit worrying and followed orders.

By the time Stark returned with a set of light blue scrubs, Alpha had skimmed the remaining documents and slid them back the way they had been delivered, and left the vacant tray, empty pitcher and envelope on the counter. “Good read?” Stark asked. Alpha did not deign to answer. He watched Ironman deposit the scrubs on the counter and take the tray, but not before fixing the Winter Soldier with an uncomfortably earnest gaze. “Hey. So. I got some friends who sent me some of the information about what Hydra did to you and. It’s not. You don’t even remember what they did, do you? Because it wasn’t pretty. And they’re not going to get away with it. Don’t look at me like that. You know, you don’t have to go back. You know that, right? You have options, courtesy of the Tony Stark amnesiac assassin foundation, founded about ten minutes ago. You want to work for Fury, I’m not gonna stop you. You want to set up your own private detective agency, I’ll buy you some ad space in Time Square. You wanna skip town and start up a chicken farm I will support you one-hundred percent. Is any of this sinking in?

“It doesn’t seem like it now, but you have the Avengers in your corner—the ones still planet-side, anyway—and fighting off the Chitauri kind of makes you, I don’t know, an honorary Avenger. So you’re not going to get left behind. And most importantly, you have Tony Stark in your corner, which is more than what I had when I got back from Afghanistan. So think about it. And for the love of God, blink more often you’re drying out my eyeballs in sympathy.”

Alpha had never encountered someone who liked the sound of their own voice as much as Tony Stark, but even after Ironman left his words rattled in Alpha’s brain. He tried to push them away while he shrugged into the large scrubs, but the same thought kept intruding into his consciousness.

“What the hell would I do on a chicken farm?”

 

In a separate wing of the base, in a cell not unlike Alpha’s, Beta lay strapped to his bed and glared at Stark when he entered, followed by Banner. Stark wore his armor and a shit eating grin, and Banner was in a lavender button down and khaki slacks, carrying a carpet bag of necessary things and trying not to look sheepish. “Check in,” Beta barked at the ceiling while his heart rate skyrocketed.

“Here,” Alpha answered, firm and even. “State you status, Winter Soldier.”

“Stark and Banner have entered my cell,” he replied. His metal arm hung limp off the side of the bed, and he wished for the hundredth time that day he could will it to function. He could hear Alpha draw in a sharp breath.

“Calm down, Capsicle,” Stark bulldozed. “We’re just going to fix his arm and take out any and all nasty surprises it might have in it. You can listen to the whole process from the comfort of your room.”

“Stark,” Alpha growled. “Leave him alone.”

“Tony, he’s hyperventilating,” Banner said.

“Oh that’s not good.”

Banner ran a hand through his hair. “Talk to me, Soldier.” He hoped Beta would say something, and from there he could calm him down, but Alpha answered.

“Beta, were you with me on the op in the Congo?” The Winter Soldier’s eyes rolled and he struggled against his bonds to no avail, but he seemed to be listening. “I don’t think you were. It feels like a waking dream. But they had this stuff—palm wine, they would get it straight out of trees and then keep it in gourds, and bury those underground to keep cool. And the stuff wasn’t strong when they tapped it straight from the tree, but it got stronger the longer they kept it underground.

“For some reason I was out and about, half mad, maybe with some kind of fever or withdrawals, or a hiccup in my programming. I found a gourd that got forgotten underground for a few days; it could strip paint. It was really, really nasty. I popped the top off and one of the flies that wouldn’t quit buzzing around my face flew near the fumes and dropped dead. Straight out of the air. Stone dead. Ask me what I did with it, Beta.”

Beta grit his teeth for a moment before he relented. “What did you do with it?”

“I drank it.”

“Sounds about right,” Stark muttered.

“And then?” Beta demanded.

“Have you ever smelled colors? It’s disconcerting.”

“You need a helmet,” Beta scolded. “All that’s left in your skull is mush.”

Banner laid out an array of tools and knelt beside the bed. “Sergeant, I’m going to take a peek inside your metal arm. It shouldn’t hurt, but I’m not going to do anything without your permission.”

Beta deliberated for a long moment, and then Alpha’s voice broke across the cell once more. “Let them work, Soldier. The worst they can do to it is break it more. Did we ever go on mission together in Africa?”

He ignored that the worst the scientists—technicians?—could do was break _him_ more, and he graciously allowed Alpha to redirect him. “Don’t recall,” he said stiffly as Banner popped open the outer casing of his arm at his acquiescing nod. “Then again, I don’t recall much of anything before yesterday. I might have been in Russia, though.”

“Russia. I don’t think I served with you over there. What’s that like?”

“Cold.” Stark seemed to be scanning his arm with some kind of hand-held device while Banner prodded at the twisted circuitry. It didn’t hurt, but the scarcely liminal scraping of tools against the inner shell might as well have been a bone saw against his frayed nerves. He forced himself to breathe. “Sharp vodka, like you could never find anywhere else in the world. Now that would strip paint, but probably won’t make you see colors. I still think in Russian sometimes.” He dreamed in it: Russian words wrapped around the color red for the most part so far. Stark seemed done with his scan and was frowning at the screen on his device.

“Either of you been to Paris?” Stark offered in the lull, because apparently any moment without conversation was a wasted moment with him. “It’s the city of love; I think you two would benefit. Bruce can chaperone so you don’t accidentally dismantle the Louvre.” Banner exhaled slowly, and Beta caught him rolling his eyes. “Had a fantastic time in Paris, really. I don’t remember it either but there are still some videos floating around the internet. Word of advice: practice safe browsing, kids. Don’t Google without safe search or you might see more of me than you’re comfortable with.”

“I’m sure Pepper was thrilled,” Bruce grumbled. He dropped a small round device on the floor, no bigger than a button, and a second of its kind joined it a moment later.

“She got a five percent raise out of the PR fallout, so why wouldn’t she be?” Stark scoffed. “What about you, Jolly Green? Where have you been in this wide, wide world?”

“Everywhere, it feels like,” Banner supplied, but his lips were twisted unhappily into their melancholy default expression. “Anywhere the US government and SHIELD wouldn’t come looking for me. Not that it mattered. You’re going to feel something, Sergeant, so please do not punch me, or _I_ may accidentally dismantle the city. Again.”

Beta raised an eyebrow at that and nodded. And then Banner tugged on something and pushed something else and sensation returned to the heavy limb in a rush, static zipping across his brain and making his entire back bow. Beta gasped, and the metal arm did jerk, but not enough to unseat Banner. He raised the metal hand to look at it, clenched and unclenched his fist, touched each fingertip to his thumb. It was stiff, but functional. Stiff but functional could take him a lot of places if he set his mind to it.

He waited for Banner and Stark to retreat, to take the little round bugs exhumed from his arm and the scans Stark had taken and parse them for some purpose. Instead, Stark applied a key from a compartment on his person to the locks around Beta’s flesh wrist and ankles. He lay still while the metal bonds came away, watching the men with wary eyes, waiting for the other shoe to drop. What usually came next was caning, or a bench with a barrel of water at one end and a helpful assistant with a cloth and a sadism streak a mile wide. What actually came next was a set of powder blue scrubs set on the foot of the bed and the promise of sandwiches to come, and then the scientists-maybe-technicians wandered away, bickering mild-naturedly the whole way.

He stayed stock still on the cot, knowing the trap was set and wondering how it would spring. But the scrubs were soft and inviting against his ankle where Ironman had left them, and he was stiff and sore from lying in one position for so long. He sat up slowly and rolled his shoulders. Both shoulders. And that was a foolish thing—better to interrogate and try to break him with his left arm nonfunctional. But could SHIELD be as foolish as that? He pulled the scrubs on and huddled in on himself on the mattress. Perhaps that was more for the psychological angle than the physical: give him the use of both of his arms, and then take one (or both) away. No, he decided. They would have to kill him to do such a thing. He would make sure of that.

“Sergeant Barnes!” The genteel British voice so far had been nothing but patient, but now it sounded almost exasperated. “Your bed is for sleeping on, not for improvising weapons with.” The metal arm whirred when he forcibly yanked the frame apart and uprooted the legs from the bolts in the floor.

“Beta, the voice tells me you are engaged in combat with your bed.” Alpha sounded dryly amused, and maybe just a shade smug. What a trendsetter.

“Shut up. I’m winning.” A few choice alterations and he had a makeshift club. He turned it over and over in his left hand and waited.

 

“Stark! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Tony squinted up at Fury for a moment before turning back to the stack of sandwich makings on the counter. “I feel like we’ve had this conversation already, Nick. Hand me the mustard, will ya?” The whole building felt surreal to him in the daylight hours. This was one of the most secret break rooms in the country, where spies came to hunker down for breaks or lunches away from the cafeteria, and it still managed to look like any number of bland break rooms in the world. Yellowed linoleum, gray tables and counters, white walls. There were dentist offices with more personality. And there was also Fury, dressed in a long black coat that was probably meant to intimidate, but made him look like a displaced Dracula on an episode of _The Office_. He hoped no one had noticed the mutilated toaster he hid in the cabinet.

Fury crossed his arms. “My people disabled the Winter Soldier’s mechanized arm for a reason.”

“Really? Hadn’t noticed. Seriously. Mustard. Gimme.”

“And don’t think I didn’t notice you sneaking the Captain his dossier. That’s crossing a line, Stark.”

“You wanna talk about crossing lines? What was Phase 2, again, because that was crossing a line. You don’t get to promise clean energy and deliver weapons. And don’t make that face at me, I know I was the Merchant of Death. But, see, if I can see the difference between a power source and a destructive source, anyone can. And I don’t think you’re seeing it, Nick. Pun intended.”

“Watch it, Stark. I have half a mind to eject you from the premises. I know you’re feeling protective of your father’s friends but I can promise you they’re in good hands.”

Maybe the eyepatch jab was a bit much, but dragging Howard into it wasn’t making Fury any friends. “You know, without me here when were your people going to feed them?”

“I have a whole team—“

“When? Never mind. I have the Ironman suit, which means if they’re going to kill me they at least have to work at it. Which is why I have been able to move in and out of their rooms freely while your team sits on their hands. So forgive me if I seem to be taking charge. Yes, Bruce and I gave Barnes his arm back, because we’re not sadistic assholes. It’s not nice when someone holds you forcibly against your will, and maybe having the use of his arm back would give him some, let’s call it equilibrium. Sue me.”

“So you think giving him access to a dangerous weapon will somehow endear him to SHIELD?”

“Dangerous weapon, prosthetic limb, potato-potahto. Are we done with this conversation? Because I’m done with this conversation. I love these chats, Nick. I’m sure Pepper can pencil you in for the next time you want to berate me.” Tony scooted around Fury with a pile of sandwiches on the tray and absolutely did not flee the break room like it was on fire.

“And put the damn toaster back together!” Fury barked at his retreating back. He might have returned to his office then, but something told him Stark had not bothered to bring sandwich makings from home. Sure enough, a perfunctory exploration of the cupboards uncovered a startling lack of bread and peanut butter, and an overwhelming amount of disassembled toaster, the latter poorly hidden behind a roll of paper towels and a spare napkin dispenser. He grimaced. “I have just about had it with these motherfucking Avengers in my motherfucking base.”

 

 The silence of the cell pressed in against Alpha's ears and wormed under his skin. He sat in his bivouac, idle, missionless, and without the aid of a handler, the Chair or any number of chemicals routinely injected into his bloodstream, the covers of any number of previous lives started to bleed into his consciousness. He sat in his bivouac, mostly staring at the opposite wall and sometimes dozing, but mostly he remembered.

 

_The Winter Soldier does not fear pain, does not shrink from punishment, does not shirk correction. He sits in the Chair and stares blankly at the Other Chair, empty and oddly ominous. A technician slides a pair of pliers behind his lips, selects the appropriate molar, and yanks until it pulls free at the root and blood oozes across his tongue. The handler is there, and when he asks what he is being corrected for, he smirks and explains that this is no punishment. “It’s an upgrade. You’re being issued standard equipment.”_

_His fingers twitch. His tongue worries over the aching hole where a perfectly good tooth had been. “Will you remove my arm next?”_

_The handler frowns, unsettled. “Why would we do that?” he asks, and his tone is cautious and probing at once, his eyes sneaking over the restraints on the Chair._

_“For a metal prosthesis?” His voice trails away. He has never seen a metal prosthesis, has never known anyone to be given one, does not know where this line of thought comes from. And the handler is so unhappy._

_“Wipe him and put him back in cryo. No, put that down! This takes precedent.” Alpha leans back in the chair before anyone need push him there, and this, at least, is a procedure that brooks no explanation. He has said the wrong thing, and the machine lowers over his face, cradles his head, and however much he gasps and struggles in the restraints there is no escaping the volts._

 

 

_The Winter Soldier awakes from cryo and steps into the room, where technicians bustle and handlers give orders. They lead him to the Chair, but the metal arm does not swoop over his face, does not cradle his head, does not send white hot bolts arcing through his skull. Technicians push needles full of clear fluids into his veins and he looks about the room. He knows better than to ask, but the sense of Wrongness niggles in the fore of his mind. Tactical gear goes on and he selects his weapons. The shield goes on his arm and he finds himself tracing the red star in the center with a gloved fingertip. The room falls deathly silent. He thinks of a matching star and the rage of mountainous winter wind and the sense that his left arm has been forcibly detached from the rest of him, though it hangs warm and solid from his shoulder._

_They are in Wakanda, marching to the extraction point after a successful mission. The strike team, his people, laugh and chat softly in the damp rainforest gloom, but the Winter Soldier does not know laughter, does not offer words. His shield hangs down his back from his shoulders, still tacky with blood. He looks at his group and counts their heads twice. All are accounted for. Except._

_“Where is the Other?” he asks one of the quiet members who had begun to lag behind the group and so was closest to the Soldier._

_“Uh, what?”_

_“Where is the Other?” The Winter Soldier stops marching and eyes the trees, squinting through the evening shadows. The back of his neck prickles unpleasantly._

_“Other? We’re all here, Soldier. We came with twelve and we’re leaving with twelve, see? Are you okay? You’re not stroking out, are you?”_

_“There’s supposed to be a second,” he says quietly. In this moment in time he can give their precise coordinates, the nearest city to them, could navigate his way to the extraction point with nothing more than the stars and he has never felt so lost in all his life._

_“Come on,” the team member hissed. “We’re falling behind.”_

_They are in Zaire, and there is a CIA agent who will make the politics of sub-Saharan Africa messy, and that CIA agent will die tonight. The Winter Soldier and his team creep through sleeping Kinshasa. The CIA agent is slippery, and a suspicious bastard to boot, and it will take nothing short of a visit from the Winter Soldier to eliminate him. That is, until an ominous crunch makes one of the team members pause and turn to glare at the Winter Soldier. “What are you eating? I hope you brought enough for the class!” he snarls in a stage whisper._

_The Winter Soldier’s lips part and white foam slips down his chin. His eyes roll. He crumples to the ground, convulsing._

_The cyanide capsule hidden in his false tooth was potent enough to kill an average man his size. But he is not average, and he lives, and Hydra will not permit him a cyanide capsule again._

_The mission in Somalia goes well and they make the extraction point about 90 minutes early, which means a few rounds of cards. The Winter Soldier stands aside, his eyes staring through the wall of the shack they have holed up in, blank, listless when only an hour ago he had the cool hard focus of a diamond point drill. But the mission is over, and he has done well, and he does not play cards because that is something people do. The leader of this Strike team does not like the way the Winter Soldier stands there, solid and unmoving like a fixture, and he orders him to perform a routine perimeter sweep. The Winter Soldier complies, and 90 minutes later he misses extraction._

_Hydra searches for him for a little over two weeks. When they find him on some nameless riverbank he comes willingly enough, walking as if in a dream, eyes vacant. After extraction they ask him what happened. He will not answer. They secure his wrists to a table and push flat metal files under each nail. They push until the nail rips off his finger and blood flows freely. They ask again. He says nothing. Rinse and repeat ten times. He does not scream or cry or wince—only watches dully. They have removed all ten of his fingernails and he says nothing until they tug him, unresisting, to the Chair. They strap him in and he sits back without prompting, but he looks at the handler, lips parted. “But where is he?” he asks, and there is a name sitting heavy on his tongue, a name he has forgotten and the handler has no answers for him, only the lightning that eliminates erratic behavior._

_They are in Wakanda. The Winter Soldier has never been to Africa but he knows the rainforest like he knows his own face, and he knows the whims of the rivers, and he knows not to let Tsetse flies near his people, who might succumb to the sleeping sickness. He makes sure they boil their drinking water for 20 minutes, and any water that comes to the boiling pot gets filtered for water fleas first. “Why all the caution?” one of his comrades asks on a laugh. The Winter Soldier does not answer. His words do not matter. His team is soft and white and susceptible to the wiles of a continent they have not bothered to understand, and so he will do what must be done. He always does what must be done._

_They are in Wakanda and there is an enhanced individual that SHIELD wants to speak to and Hydra wants to eliminate. The Winter Soldier watches her from the shadows, like a ghost, and he has never seen her like before but he is almost certain he has seen another walk like her, like she knows where she is going, like she knows her worth and is not afraid to stand head and shoulders above the men around her._

_They are in Wakanda and the sniper in his team is dark haired and blue-eyed and maybe just a little vain, but too tall at six foot four. He lines up the shot, and though the Winter Soldier does not see him he knows he must, because a silent bullet slices the air and the girl, the Target, drops dead. He confirms her death while people scream in the street and crowd to her side._

_They are in Wakanda and the sniper takes his time meeting back with the team so they can make the extraction point. He folds his rifle into its case, clears up the area and ducks into a shadow for a quick smoke, only to bump into the Winter Soldier. “Och! Startled me there,” he laughs, and his eyes crease, and his front teeth are just this side of crooked and he is all Wrong. He takes a drag off his cigarette. “Better be getting back, yeah?”_

_And the Winter Soldier gives him a sad smile, his blue eyes dropping down to the man’s uniform and the little red insignia there, his lashes casting shadows on his pale cheek._

_For a moment, one wild moment, the trees of Wakanda are the summer trees of Brooklyn (though he has never seen Brooklyn, has never been there, would not know Brooklyn if her were deployed there in that moment) and his eyes drift over the innocuous red insignia, a skull with many arms, and the trees that are Wakanda that are Brooklyn are the trees of Italy_

_and the air that is light with birdsong is heavy with gunpowder and bursting shells and he looks at that innocuous red insignia, so harmless, so whimsical and the Wrongness creeps into his bones and_

_and she was strong and dark and powerful and she walked like a queen until the bullet dropped her into the dirt and_

_and they are in Wakanda when the Winter Soldier makes extraction but the sniper doesn’t. The handler goes to collect him from his sniper’s nest, joking that he’s probably just having himself a quick smoke, and he comes back with a corpse, its head twisted at an unnatural angle, and they’re talking about guerilla warriors and they need to move right now. If the handler watches the Winter Soldier closely until they return to base, he says nothing of it._

 

This is what they say about the Winter Soldier.

They say the Winter Soldier is a ghost, a terrorist, the killing force of an army wrapped into the ideal tactical weapon. They say he stands at six foot two, and sometimes at five foot ten. They say he stands head and shoulders above any agent. They say he has no soul, only the mission imperative and the will to finish the job.

They never say that the ghost himself is haunted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When talking about the Cold War, everyone wants to go over the Space Race and how tense the U.S. and Russia were. However, very recently I learned that there was another stage where the tensions of the Cold War played out: Africa. The Congo especially suffered a bloody tug of war, orchestrated by the CIA and the KGB. If the CIA finnagled the politics to make someone sympathetic to the United States a national leader, the KGB would whack the figure heard and appoint their own sympathetic person, who would then get whacked by the CIA. This is a very brief, bare bones description of the Cold War; do add more/better information into the comments if I have something wrong (or if you just like sharing).  
> So if Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, was in Russia during this time training Black Widows and sewing Hydra's brand of "order" through the Motherland, then where is Steve Rogers, also the Winter Soldier? Africa, of course! 
> 
> It should also be noted that Hydra is very white. Like, suspiciously, solidly white. And, being foreign (read: willfully ignorant), Hydra agents might not be well-versed in the different rituals soft Westerners need to perform to prevent coming down with sicknesses unique to sub-Saharan Africa. Which is why one of the team members thinks Alpha is being overly cautious while he's actually doing the bare minimum to keep his Strike team comfortable and alive.


	4. Research, Therapy and Bucky Bears- Oh My!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who the hell is Bucky? That’s the name of an old cover. A dead cover,” Beta replied, but without heat. Alpha looked over at the other Winter Soldier, and realized he would never be able to see Beta again, not when Bucky hovered in the air between them.

Stark decided to let Fury try his hand at rehabilitating the Winter Soldiers, and it went about as well as expected. A pair of psychologists—a white-haired woman and a middle-aged man—in white lab coats entered Alpha’s cell after JARVIS warned him. They stood and smiled politely at the island while he watched them warily. No one in a white coat ever did him any favors.

The man talked at him, cajoled at him, beckoned him to come towards them, encouraged him to talk about himself, or just talk. Alpha waited for the punchline. After 45 minutes of that they left.

The psychologists came to Beta’s cell, after JARVIS warned him about their arrival. They stood by the island in his room, and the man talked at him, cajoled at him, beckoned him to come near them. Beta crouched by his makeshift bivouac and rolled his makeshift metal club between his palms. After about ten minutes of that he took his metal index finger and ran it along the metal frame of what had once been a bed, making a metallic scream that had the man and woman clapping their hands over their ears. They left after that.

 

“So how do the kids like rehab?” Tony asked sweetly. He leaned back in the wheelie chair and put his feet on the desk for maximum obnoxiousness.

At this point, Fury did not even bother to act surprised. “Stark, why are you in my office?” 

And what an office it was! White walls, gray carpetting, and all glass and chrome in between. Fury maintained a ridiculously neat space--not Pepper Potts neat, but still leaps and bounds less cluttered than your garden variety office worker. Tony sat behind his expansive glass desk, an ironically transparent piece of furniture for an intelligence agency, and carefully left fingerprints over the surface. So far his attempts at hacking Fury's personal work computer had been a bust (the man was only connected to wifi when it suited him) but he suspected all the files and information he did not leave on his desk were encrypted deep within the SHIELD network, like a nugget of creamy filling in an Easter treat.  

He grinned. “I brought you a present!” he deflected.

A muscle in his face twitched. “Tell me you’re marrying Potts and having the honeymoon far, far away from me. Like the moon.”

“Nick, you of all people should know that Miss Potts is a free spirit.”

“I will personally send you to the moon, is all I’m saying.”

“I’m touched, but I’m not going to the moon, Princess Celestia. Look at this!” Tony picked up a toaster from the floor behind his chair and placed it on the desk. He beamed.

“Is that the break room toaster?”

“Even better! It’s a toaster that _looks_ like the one from the break room.”

“Meaning there is still a toaster-shaped pile of useless hardware floating around in one of the cupboards.”

“You’re welcome. Look, it has a bagel setting!”

Fury dropped himself into one of his guest chairs and stretched his legs out. “They don’t like the psychologists, but they didn’t bludgeon them to death, so I’m counting that as progress.”

Fury kept one of those useless desk ornaments by his computer: it had five metal balls suspended by clear twine, and the point was that pulling back one ball would make it crash into the others, three of which would remain perfectly stationary but the fifth would bounce away and come back. And repeat. Stark set the ball in motion, filling the room with the steady _clack clack clack_ of metal spheres hitting other metal spheres. “Psychologists? As in plural?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Mm.” _Clack. Clack. Clack._ “JARVIS still thinks we should put the Wonder Twins in the same cell. And as bat shit insane as that sounds, it might help. They wouldn’t be so disconnected, and they wouldn’t be outnumbered.”

“I’ll take that into consideration.”

 

While Fury considered his brilliant contribution, Tony trusted the Winter Soldiers would not be disappeared in the night and made his way home, to his workshop. He had some reading to do. He was only able to skim a couple of the Hydra files Natasha and Clint sent him, but what he had seen was more than enough to set his teeth on edge. He needed to go in a lot deeper than that to unbrainwash the Winter Soldiers, and to prevent anything like this from happening again.

So that afternoon and into the evening, and well into the night, he dug through the glut of documents Natasha sent him. Half of it was useless: inventories, redacted accounts of milk run missions, renditions of meeting minutes in German, Russian, Italian. It was only after he had JARVIS translate some of these into English that he realized these weren’t necessarily Hydra meetings. Some of these minutes sounded like what Fury would say, or Hill. Another file dated back nearly ten years and came from Stark Industries. That one had Obadiah Stane written hastily in the agenda, and he had to take a walk before JARVIS translated that one.

Most of what he read had nothing to do with the Winter Soldier project. There were bank statements, experiment write ups, money transfers, receipts. But every once in a while he would stumble across a document that talked about them obliquely. There was a transfer of ownership of a pair of cryogenic tanks (and their contents) from one redacted name to another. There was a record of correction when “the agent in question refused to provide a detailed report of the mission. The [redacted] received 50 (fifty) lashes with a whip.”

“Fifty? Jesus,” Tony muttered to himself, thinking that was getting awful close to whipping someone to death. And then realizing, with a twist in his stomach, that fifty lashes wouldn’t necessarily kill a super soldier.

More bank statements. Travel receipts. He opened up a map on one of his spare displays and started putting little red thumbtack icons over the locations he comes across, only to find that Hydra’s reach spanned most of the major cities of the world. He kept doing it anyway.

Overall, it looked like 90% of what Hydra did came down to paperwork, i.e. scooting money from one place to another, filing lawsuits and being generally boring. And then he opened a document that had Howard Stark printed across the header and he took another walk around his building before having JARVIS translate it to English. If his father was involved with Hydra…

Well, what then? Clean up Howard’s mess like usual, he supposed. He brewed another pot of coffee and took a generous pull from his bourbon before he settled back at his bench. “Just another day at the office,” he muttered and then reopened the document.

He read it. It was so much worse than he could have anticipated. He read it again.

 

A different voice from the usual genteel British one alerted Alpha about a change in status. “Captain Rogers?” Female this time, firm and cool and with the flat cadence of a Midwesterner. He looked up from his troubled reverie. “There is a team of men who will escort you to an interview room. You will be evaluated by a pair of our best psychologists so we can begin the rehabilitation and deprogramming process. Any attempts of violence or escape are unadvised; you will be incapacitated before you leave the hallway. You will need to leave behind any and all improvised weapons you have on your person.  As in your room, the hall and the interview room are armed with a nonlethal gas that will knock you out temporarily. Your full cooperation is appreciated.”

There’s the rub; they plan to reprogram him, he thought, and got to his feet. And escape, while attractive, would be impractical in a set of blue scrubs, with no shoes and weaponless. He dropped his bedframe club on the floor and stepped away from his bivouac, knitted his fingers together and placed them behind his head. No, with escape removed as an option he must wait for Hydra to extract him, or for SHIELD to make a fatal mistake. The door opened and, sure enough, a dozen armed guards waited for him on the other side of the jamb. He went with them, quiet like a lamb to slaughter.

They walked him down the hall a ways, and it was quite a hall—almost long enough to see the curvature of the Earth. He noted other doors like his, other cells, some closer together than others, meaning a wide variance in size. His armed ensemble marched him about fourteen doors down, to a bland room with a gray floor and white walls. A table stood in the center, two chairs on one side and two chairs on the other so that everyone at the table would have a clear line of sight of the door. Already seated there was Beta, his face cold and blank, opposite the same white-haired female psychologist and a much younger man with dark hair and a dark, almost ruddy complexion. The guards closed the door behind Alpha and it locked with a distinct click, leaving him alone with the other Winter Soldier and the two psychologists.

He took the chair by Beta. It was metal, flimsy, a fold up chair, the likes of which can be found in storage rooms and basements of any organization. The table was the same; it could be broken down and neatly folded and slid into a crawlspace, or behind a water heater, or kept between a washer and dryer. Alpha turned his attention to the psychologists.

They had draped their white coats over the backs of their chairs. The man was smiling a nervous smile, looking for all the world like he would rather be anywhere else. He sweated and tugged at his collar. Beside him, the white-haired woman exuded perfect confidence and professionalism. She wore bifocals and cat earrings. Worry lines marked her forehead, laugh lines her eyes. She spoke softly, with the softest lilt of a German accent. “We met before. I am Doctor Guthman and this is John Ramirez. Do forgive my colleague Doctor Herman from earlier; sometimes he gets so excited he forgets to think like doctor.” She laid her empty hands on the table top and Alpha looked them over briefly. Her nails were short, unpainted but clean. A plain gold band adorned her left hand ring finger and, besides the cat earrings, looked to be the only ornament she wore on her person. She had thin wrists and prominent blue veins under her old skin. She had a scientist’s hands, the kind of scientist whose only activity was to apply pen to paper—a gun would fall from her grip, a scalpel held shakily at best. Alpha dragged his eyes back up to her face. “It may not seem like it now, but we’re here to help. What you say to me will be held in confidence. What you say in this room stays in this room until you decide otherwise. Any recordings we make you will be fully aware of and will not be made or shared without your explicit consent. Today we have surveillance on the room: visual only. No one but Ramirez and myself can hear you.” She took a breath and adjusted her bifocals. “If you wish to leave at any point you may get up and knock on the door twice. The guards on the other side will escort you to your room. There will be no negative consequences if you choose to go that route. From now on we’re going to meet in this room, like this, for an hour. If you don’t wish to talk, that’s fine. I will fill the hour myself and tell you about my cats.”

“Please don’t,” Ramirez muttered.

“My cat stories are objectively better than your fishing stories,” she parried smoothly, in the same professional tone. “I think it’s also important to tell you gentlemen that I have been a psychologist for forty years, and I have worked for SHIELD for nineteen of them. There is literally nothing you can say that would shock me. I earned my doctorate under the supervision a rabid Freudian: there is no part of human nature I find unspeakable.”

Ramirez bobbed his head. “I haven’t been a psychologist for as long,” he admitted with a wry smile. “I got my Masters about four years ago, and I’ve been with SHIELD about two. I served in Afghanistan for three tours before I went back to school. So I know a little about combat, and I know a lot about coming home and, uh, and not leaving the combat completely behind. I don’t know if anything you say can shock me or not, but there’s a pretty good bet I won’t wilt like a delicate flower or anything.” He grinned again, being friendly like people do. Neither Alpha nor Beta returned it, but he did not seem phased.

Guthman continued. “Violent outbursts will not be tolerated. If you need to leave, you are welcome to do so. If you need us to leave, we will. Verbal outbursts are permissible. You can swear as much as you like; I am not your mother, and I have heard it all before. We will talk about things that make you uncomfortable, like feelings and your pasts. We will explore these things, sometimes in great depth, and you will learn to get past and overcome them. It will be marginally unpleasant sometimes, and skin-meltingly horrifying other times, but it needs to be done.

“My supervisor wants you two to become the historical figures you once were. If you’ll pardon my language, that is horseshit.” Beside him, Beta’s eyebrow twitched upwards. “I’m not naïve. I know you two weren’t ever the Bucky Barnes and the Captain America they put in the history books, and you certainly weren’t the ones they put in the comic books, either. And you changed. Life happened.”

Alpha carefully schooled his face to belie the rushing sound in his ears. That was the name. _That was the name!_

“I’m going to be honest,” Guthman continued, unaware of the inner turmoil threatening to rip Alpha apart. “You will never be the same people you were in the forties. Life does not come with a reset button. There are no take backs. But you will grow, and you will learn new things about yourselves, and that is far preferable to trying to hammer you both back into your pre-Hydra roles. That said, no one here is going to refer to you as the Winter Soldier, and everyone will want to call you Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes. Are these names amenable to you, or would you prefer to be called something else?”

Beta chewed the inside of his cheek. Alpha stared at the opposite wall some degrees to the right of Ramirez’s shoulder.

“You don’t need to answer now,” she said when it became obvious neither of them were going to fill the silence. “But it bears thinking about. That is going to be your homework for tonight.” She glanced at Ramirez’s wristwatch. “Do either of you have anything to add?” She looked from Alpha to Beta and back again. “Alright. I know your rooms are rather sparse and, after receiving an email on my lunch break, I advised my supervisor to allow you two to room together. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find boredom to be a real brain killer. I brought you two something.”

Ramirez grinned again, a genuinely warm smile that creased his brown eyes and he reached for a white paper shopping bag on the floor, careful to move casually and slowly enough to telegraph his movements. Smart man. He picked up the bag and upended its contents on the metal table.

“This isn’t everything,” Guthman sighed. “I didn’t have a big enough bag. Some things have been taken to your room and will be there when you return.”

Alpha and Beta stared. There were five used and abused paperbacks, two crisp coloring books, a box of crayons, a tightly rolled up navy blue fleece blanket, a pack of gummy bears, a pack of M&Ms, and a stuffed bear. This last Alpha picked up and turned over. It was very soft.

“That one I contributed,” Ramirez beamed. “I know it’s dumb, but I thought if anyone could appreciate a Bucky Bear it would be one of you two.”

He ran a thumb over one of the button eyes. _A Bucky Bear?_ He slowly turned in his seat to look at Beta somberly, then lifted the bear to his face. Beta stared back, his mouth pressed into a thin line. The psychologists watched, trying not to look alarmed and failing. Beta held perfectly still as the bear inched toward his face and Alpha, unable to believe he was going to get away with it, pressed the bear’s nose to Beta’s stubbly cheek with a wet kissy noise. Beta swatted the bear clear across the room and scowled. Alpha didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing. The psychologists resumed breathing, Guthman unruffled and Ramirez trying to keep his eyes from popping out of his head.

“I think that about wraps it up for today,” she said briskly, checking the time again before placing the things back in the bag. “I have also been asked to tell you that your beds are for sleeping on and not making weapons out of. That was a very firm caveat in the email. Sergeant, I believe your mattress has been relocated but the frame is beyond salvaging, and no one is going to replace your beds until you appear ready to quit tearing them apart.” She stood up and spared the Soldiers a small, tight smile. “I will see you two again tomorrow, same time, same place. Keep thinking about what you two want to be called and have a good evening.”

The door opened and the guards ushered the Soldiers away, but not before Alpha scooped the Bucky Bear from the floor where it had fallen and tucked it under his arm. They were both led back to Alpha’s cell, now their shared room, and sure enough there were two mattresses there, one leaning against the wall and the other still in its makeshift bivouac. There was also a stack of eight puzzles on the island. Beta investigated them with a shrewd eye once the door of their cell was safely locked and they were alone. “They’re all used, looks like,” he said after a fashion. “Plain cardboard pieces, fancy art scenes except this one.” He lifted the bottommost box with a raised eyebrow. “Freshly bought, never been opened.” He skimmed the cover. “Solid green, front and back, no corner or edge pieces, four of the pieces are missing.”

Alpha squinted. “That sounds frustrating. Why would they sell a puzzle with missing pieces?”

“Capitalism?” he shrugged.

“Capitalism,” Alpha agreed. He untucked the bear from his arm and launched it hard at Beta’s head. He caught it with his flesh hand and whipped it back at him. Alpha caught it with a laugh, closer to a bark than a chuckle, and tossed the bear to the bivouac. Beta opened all the puzzles and peaked in the boxes. “Any notes? Drops? Cryptic messages?” he asked in an undertone, approaching the island.

Beta shook his head. “Hydra might not be here.”

“Hydra is everywhere,” Alpha answered. He rested his palm on Beta’s lower back. The man stilled under his touch.

“We are under _surveillance_ ,” he growled. “And Hydra is everywhere, you said it yourself.” He glared daggers at the inoffensive cardboard pieces. He picked one of them up and ran a metal thumb along its painted side, punctured by a distinct set of sharp teeth. “I think these are Guthman’s puzzles. A cat has gotten to this one.”

Alpha hummed. “Your name used to be Bucky.”

“You’re going to do this? Right now?”

“If not now, when?” Alpha answered, his voice kept low and gentle. He took the puzzle box and walked it to the bivouac, kicked the spare mattress to the floor, sat on it cross-legged and tipped over the box of pieces onto the hard tile. Beta rolled his shoulders a few times and then padded over to the mattress and dropped himself gracelessly next to Alpha. They turned the puzzle pieces picture side up and sorted edges from inside pieces in silence for a few minutes. “Your name was Bucky,” Alpha said again, just for the sake of saying it. The name fit nicely, rolled off the tongue, all hard syllables and boyish charm, honest and mischievous at once.

“Who the hell is Bucky? That’s the name of an old cover. A dead cover,” Beta replied, but without heat. Alpha looked over at the other Winter Soldier, and realized he would never be able to see Beta again, not when Bucky hovered in the air between them.

Alpha fit a blue piece of sky to another piece of sky and pushed them near the top of what would be a picturesque castle and foliage scene. “Not a cover. That was who you were, Before. I remember. You were born James, but you became Bucky.”

Beta, maybe Bucky, rubbed a hand over his face. “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry was named James, felt like,” he muttered. “I don’t want to remember.”

“Would you rather the Chair?”

He elbowed Alpha in the side. “Would you?” He worried his bottom lip between his teeth, and slotted an edge of green to another edge of green. “But I wouldn’t mind cryo, I think. Just cryo, until the Sun swallowed the Earth and everyone on it. Will Hydra extract us, ya think?”

Alpha pushed the pieces around and around for a minute, staring without seeing. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want them to?”

“I don’t know.”

 

Tony squirmed on the floor for a moment and flung out a hand to silence his alarm clock. Scratch that—to turn off the jangling of his stupid traitorous phone, which was just out of reach by about eight feet. He peeled one eye open, groaned, and let it slide shut. His mouth felt gritty and fuzzy in turns, dry and awful with the potent taste of regret curdling on his tongue. Pulsing headache, wobbly knees and a distinct lurching in his gut told him this was going to be The End for him. Tony Stark, genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist, died today of a horrific hangover, survived by girlfriend Pepper Potts and adopted science bro Bruce Banner. His limited AI robots Dummy, Butterfingers and You will be donated to a city college later this week.

His stupid phone jangled again, dancing along with its stupid vibrate setting on full blast. “Sir? Agent Romanoff is on the line and it would appear she needs to speak with you relatively urgently,” JARVIS said.

“Muh,” Tony burbled and rolled himself over so he could talk at the ceiling. “Just…just patch her through.”

There was a brief rustle of static and then Natasha’s voice rang shrill and harsh across his eardrums. “Goddammit Stark! I’ve been trying to call you!”

“Look, can we do this not now? Maybe not ever? I’m really not feeling it.”

“No!” she snapped. “I don’t have much time and I don’t know when I can get back to you, so listen closely. SHIELD has been compromised.”

“Compromised?” He rubbed his temples and slowly pushed himself into a sitting position.

“Yes. From what I can tell Hydra has been using the entire agency as a front for their own activities and I can’t be sure yet, but from what I’ve gathered it looks like Hydra has wiggled its way to the core.”

He scrubbed his eyes. “That’s not good.”

“Which means that the Winter Soldiers have to be moved ASAP because Hydra can come pick them up any time now. So get on that. Aw shit.” This last came out as a mutter and was followed by a rapid patter of gunfire.

He scrambled to his feet. “Natasha? Natasha!”

“I’m here,” she hissed, sounding a little out of breath. “I’ve been made. Gonna fall off the grid for a while. Listen up, Stark. Trust no one. I mean, no one. Anyone can be Hydra: Nick, Hill, me, anyone. Ugh. I have to run.” The line went dead.

In times of crisis when no immediate course of action presents itself, some people call their parents. Tony dialed Pepper and poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee. He was talking before she got the chance to spit out a perfunctory greeting. “SHIELD is actually a front for evil Nazi scientists, Natasha is out there getting herself killed, I have a hangover and I found out the Winter Soldier murdered my parents.” He sucked in a shuddering breath and for a moment he looked into the black depths of his coffee before launching the mug at the wall. It shattered with a satisfying sound of ceramic meeting concrete at high velocity.

He waited for Pepper to process that and then she sighed. “Okay, let me take an early lunch.”

 

Alpha awoke, wrapped in a navy blue fleece with the comforting heat of Beta—no, Bucky—pressed to his back. This is what he knew for sure: Hydra would come for them, and they would come quietly, docile under the weight of any number of sedatives, trigger phrases and threat of additional correction. They would be taken to the Chairs after a fashion. They would be strapped in and the events of the past few days would be wiped away under a torrent of electricity, and they would emerge as the perfect weapon, the Fist of Hydra, and they would be locked away in cryo. There would be no tin men bringing them sandwiches. There would be no fleece blankets or soft stuffed bears, or M&Ms. No memories, no vivid dreams that jolt him from asleep to awake at a hundred miles per hour, no confused words in languages he did not know, could not know, would never have learned. And there would be no stern old women with cat earrings, or nervous young men with kind eyes. There would be the stinging ice of forced sleep, but no gummy bears, or slightly-chewed puzzle pieces slotting neatly exactly where they should go, or the waxy smell of crayons that glide across the page. This is what Alpha knew for sure: he was loyal, and faithful, and stubborn, but most of all he was obedient, especially when disobedience could mean wide-ranging repercussions that fall on Bucky’s shoulders, across his back, that make his flesh hand bleed and his metal one whir. The Winter Soldiers were more useable together than apart, more docile, more compliant.

Alpha extricated himself from Bucky’s loose embrace and turned himself over. The other’s eyes fluttered open. Alpha rested his palm against his stubbly cheek, let his thumb trail over the skin under his eye. Alpha had been obedient his entire life, a life contained within a week, but if he were to err, he would err for Bucky. Under the room’s surveillance and the watchful eye of that genteel British voice (whoever he was, wherever he was), in front of God and everyone, Alpha pressed his lips to Bucky’s.

The kiss was brief, chaste. He drew back and pushed a lock of brown hair behind his ear. “Whassat for?” Bucky mumbled.

“I don’t need a reason,” he decided, the words falling out of his mouth before his brain could catch up. He steeled himself for what he wanted to say next, pulled something like bravado from deep within his memory and put on his earnest face. “Would you follow Captain America into the jaws of death?”

Bucky blinked, the corner of his mouth pulled down. “’M not following him anywhere. But that skinny punk from Brooklyn too dumb not to run from a fight, who signed up to be a lab rat for some highly questionable procedure that made him a huge punk _still_ too dumb to run from a fight. Well. I’m with him ‘til the end of the line.”

Alpha ducked his head. “I’m not him.”

Bucky squinted at him for a moment. “You’re him. A little scuffed up, yeah. A little bloodier, a little meaner, but you’re the same. No one can take your general Steve-ness out of you. Not Erskine, not Zola, not anyone.”

“It feels like a cover to me.”

“Like a waking dream, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You were a person Before. I remember even though you don’t. You were a person. I don’t know what we are now, broken and mixed up and compromised as hell, but we can be people. Maybe. Some day. And we’ll do what people do, like, like sing in the shower and complain about taxes, and, shit, I dunno, _not_ get into and out of cryo every other day.”

“We could buy a chicken farm.”

Bucky frowned. “What the hell would we do on a chicken farm?”

“Complain about taxes?”

Bucky let that sink in for a long moment, never breaking eye contact with Alpha-maybe-Steve. “You are a menace and I refuse to subject you to innocent animals.”

“Confound the bourgeoisie classes. We need to reclaim the means of production. With a chicken army.”

“Stop it.”

“I am going to take entire crates of Earl Grey and launch them into the Boston harbor.” He didn't laugh, but his smile bled into his voice anyway.

 

Pepper had a great office. It was well lit with a view of the city (usually more impressive when it had not been bulldozed by an alien invasion days previous, but whatever). She had an ergonomic key board with delicate little keys, wafer thin, sleek, elegant. She had one of those useless little desk ornaments: a perpetual motion machine of some sort, all angles and surprisingly annoying. She set it into motion when she got tired of people staring at her during uncomfortably one-on-one meetings (confrontations). The place was cleaner than any other CEO’s office Tony had ever visited; while Pepper had a perfectly good janitorial staff, she also believed in the “Time to lean? Time to clean.” slogan. In times of crisis, when no apparent course of action presents itself, most people call their mothers. Pepper chased dust bunnies. In the wake of the invasion, her office was spotless. Tony had seen operating rooms dirtier than this office.

And Pepper herself sat in her ergonomic wheelie chair, as elegant and professional as the rest of her environment, a salad that looked like it comprised of leafy weeds and some kind of pink vinaigrette before her, a thermos of caffeine free tea at her elbow. This last she took a generous sip from and offered him some. He waved her off; his gut would not tolerate tea.

He sank heavily into one of her gray guest chairs and slumped down about as far as he could go without ending up a puddle on the floor. She pushed green leaves around, unhurried, unflappable, and waited. “One of them killed my dad,” Tony said at last.

He scrubbed his hands over his face. “You know, I thought when it happened, that maybe my parents were fighting and they went off the side of the road and crashed. Or maybe my dad,” his jaw worked for a moment, “Dad might have been drinking that day. Or taking something he shouldn’t have been taking. I think I resented him as much as I mourned him—how messed up is that?”

“It’s not,” Pepper told him, firm and gentle, a calm voice in a tumultuous storm.

His fingers worried at his beard for a minute. “And then the Thing with Obie ™. And I got to thinking maybe he had something to do with it. I still think so. I mean, it makes sense, right? Get rid of Howard and Maria and he had a snotty seventeen-year-old orphan to basically mold into whatever he wanted, and he did. He strip-mined my brain and my image and my family’s name and when his ambitions outgrew me –only took him thirty years—he tried to get rid of me in Afghanistan.

“So yeah, I think he had a hand in killing my parents. But I know for a fact that the Winter Soldier, one of them, pulled the trigger. And I can’t. I just can’t. There are two amnesiac master assassins being held by SHIELD right now, with Hydra probably just biding their time before they come collecting, and there’s no one there for them. They’ve suffered more at the hands of Hydra than I ever could, just because they can survive what would kill a normal person, and I don’t know if I can help them. They killed my dad, Pepper. And they killed my mom.” He blinked rapidly a few times and sucked in a breath.

Pepper chewed that over for a moment and pressed a crisp white napkin to her lips. “But they need you?”

“They need someone. They need an advocate and probably a host of lawyers and just as many therapists. And I _can’t_.”

“Have you talked to them about any of this?”

He frowned. “They’re not exactly verbal right now, so no, and also, _fuck_ no. Oh my God, they killed my parents I am not going to have a heart-to-heart with them, _no_!”

“Then you’re never going to have closure and you’re going to be stuck feeling awful forever,” Pepper cut in smoothly, firm and calm.

“Yeah, okay, but here’s the thing: I don’t wanna.”

“That’s okay because you don’t need to want to, you just have to do it. So put on your big boy pants and go talk to them. Yell at them. Scold them. Ask them why they did it and all the things you look like you want to yell at me. Get it off your chest, Tony. And when you’re done, be the advocate that they need, just until they have someone who can take over for you. Also, I have a meeting with Chelsea from marketing in about four minutes, so unless you want to contribute you should go. I mean, you’re welcome to stay and I could definitely use the help; we’re looking at color swatches and fonts today—“ She fell silent when Tony hurriedly shut the door behind himself and scurried down the hall. She sipped her tea thoughtfully. “Works like a charm.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not familiar with many psychologists in the Marvel universe, so I'm just going to shamelessly foist original characters into the story.  
> The only canon psychologist I know of is Agent May's ex-husband in Agents of SHIELD, but he is 500% uninvolved with SHIELD and his five minute interview with the protagonist made me want to break everything in my house because it was so, so, so poorly done. I could not justify shoehorning him into this story on some flimsy excuse, and then artificially improving his therapeutic skills. So original characters it is.


	5. The First Shield

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And that led to a brief, stilted discussion of the maintenance process, and cryo, and an even briefer description of the Chair. Towards the end, Guthman leaned back in her chair. “It sounds like you hated it.”

Bruce Banner walked through the SHIELD hallway, though perhaps “walked” was too strong a term. Dr. Guthman had never seen a cringe so seamlessly combined with bipedal locomotion, and she spared a moment to regret the limitations of the English language and the hole in her otherwise expansive lexicon. He did not slink, nor did he trudge, but he moved somewhere along those lines. Banner was not a large man but he seemed to make himself smaller and he moved along (Lurked? Too ghoulish. Plodded? The word brought muddy turf to mind, and "traipse" seemed almost whimsical.), a little hunched in on himself, eyes watching the floor and overall seemed to project obsequiousness while he went. Guthman followed him from a safe distance, all the way to her locked office door. He paused there, knocked quietly, pushed his hands in his pockets and seemed to change his mind, turning around to leave the way he had come and found himself blocked.

“Can I help you, Dr. Banner?” she asked, all cool professionalism.

“Um, yeah. Oh. I heard you were working on the Winter Soldiers.”

She frowned. As this was her neutral facial expression, Banner seemed not to notice. “I’m afraid that’s confidential information. Did you wish to set up an appointment with a psychologist, or a social worker? I’m afraid I have a full caseload, but I have a colleague who would take you on.” She pushed her key into the lock and let him into her office.

His face twisted. “No. No! I’m not looking—I don’t need—I was wondering about the Winter Soldiers.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Confidential information, Dr. Banner. I am not going to tell you what any of my clients choose to share with me. I don’t hand out information like that. Not to you, not to my coworkers, not to Fury.” He stepped into her office with a wary look, taking in the wall-to-wall bookcases, the filing cabinets locked with case files and data, the clutter occupying her desk, the spare guest chair, the boxes of paperwork on the floor, stacks of books leaning precariously against the wall. He turned back to address her, hands in his pockets.

“No, I get that. But are they okay?” He wet his lips. “I don’t know a lot about what happened to them, but from what I’ve been able to gather it was bad. They used to be Captain America and Bucky Barnes, and if Hydra was involved it wouldn’t have been pretty.”

She watched him closely, her face a calm blank perfected over the years. “What does it matter to you, doctor?” Not an accusation, not quite a suspicion, but a question.

“Anyone who has the courage to fight an alien invasion should get the benefit of the doubt. Anyone who fights alongside the Other Guy even more so. It’s not like I have a personal interest in what happens to them. But I have a personal interest in what happens to them.” He smiled, rueful, perhaps wondering if that even made sense.

“No, I understand that,” Guthman said. “At this point, I have more questions than answers, but from what I have seen you would be better served talking to Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes than to me.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Go talk to them. Is that such a strange concept?”

“Okay, but what if they’re violent? You really want to risk the Other Guy coming out to play?”

She did not roll her eyes, but it was a near thing. “The soldiers are being kept in a prototype of a room that was originally meant to hold someone exposed to and changed by dramatic amounts of gamma radiation.”

“So you were trying to build something to contain me.”

Did his eyes look a little green? It did not matter to her. “ _I’m_ a therapist, not an architect or an engineer. And don’t be so self-centered. Not everything meant to hold an enhanced individual is meant for the Hulk. More to the point, I doubt the soldiers would be interested in triggering your transformation while in a locked room. They’re brainwashed: not stupid. Besides, they could probably use a friend.”

 

Hydra would come for them, as surely as the sun will rise. That is what Alpha-could-be-Steve knew for sure. He also knew that Dr. Friedberg was not Hydra, and that she was not afraid of the Winter Soldiers, and that she had a rat on her shoulder. She walked into their cell after ample warning from the genteel British voice, accompanied by a small army of harried men in lab coats pushing carts of medical equipment around, with Ramirez at the fore, telling them where to go. Friedberg walked with an uneven gait, and when she spoke her voice sounded rough, hoarse, almost unintelligible though her words were carefully formed and harshly articulated.

“When you were out,” she gritted out slowly, addressing the Soldiers, “we took pictures of your brains with non-in-vasive machinery. Very cool. I will send you copies later. We need to do it. Again. You heal quickly and the brains you had. On arrival will not be the brains you. Have now.” She licked her lips and seemed to take a breather for a moment. “I am. Doctor Friedberg. I have cerebral palsy, which is why I. Talk like this. I am a neurologist, which means I like. Brains. Okay. We are going to take more pictures of your brains. It will not hurt. I’ll go first and show you.”

By that time most of the lab coats had finished setting up the equipment and filed out, leaving Friedberg and Ramirez alone with the Winter Soldiers. She shuffled to the machine, a big white monstrosity, vaguely donut-shaped. She laid down on a gurney and Ramirez pushed the white plastic-and-metal donut toward her until her head rested inside. She flapped her hands at him and he took the rat from her, placed it on his own shoulder, and pressed the button.

The machine hummed, quieter than a vacuum cleaner but a little louder than a cellphone set to vibrate. It clanked ominously for a few minutes, and then resumed humming. A monitor on the other side of the gurney came to life and showed a fuzzy gray field with ripples of darker gray and sprinklings of white: a brain. Friedberg climbed clumsily out of the equipment and grinned at the monitor. “Lookit!” she crowed and waved her arm at it. “A very. Handsome brain. If I do say so myself. Okay. Who wants to go next?”

Alpha let himself be herded to the gurney and laid himself down on it, pushed his head into the machine. He breathed deeply. No leather straps secured his wrists and legs. No plates pressed over his scalp or face. If he wanted, he could bolt right now. He could clamber out and take shelter in his bivouac and no one could stop him. Inhale. Exhale. The machine hummed, a drone that settled into his bones. Inhale. Exhale. Friedberg was talking, but he couldn’t be sure if she was talking to him or not. He tuned her out. Inhale. Exhale. The machine started to clank, an unpleasant noise, and the only reason he didn’t bolt right there was because he needed to set a good example for Beta (Bucky) and it didn’t actually hurt. Inhale. Inhale. Inhale. No, that wasn’t right. Clank. Clank. Clank. He didn’t want to forget. Inhale. He would comply. He could be good. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. It didn’t hurt him. Clank. Clank. Clank. He was fine. The machine settled itself and resumed its humming. Inhale. Exhale. A metal hand brushed his fingertips and he took hold with a grip that would break mortal bones. Bucky gingerly helped him out of the machine and he stood on perfectly steady feet and his legs did not wobble even a little.

Bucky climbed in next, and besides tensing every major muscle group when the humming started he gave no indication of stress. Alpha did not hold him down or secure him in any way, but if his fingers maintained contact with Bucky’s no one mentioned it. No one else seemed to even notice.

Friedberg watched the monitor during the whole process, sometimes making surprised hmmm noises and generally being pleased. At the end Alpha helped Bucky out of the machine and they watched her eye the screen for a long minute. Then she turned to address them. “It’s too soon to make any. Definitive statements. But it looks good. Still some damage. Some dendritic pruning that can be. Problematic later. But brains are resilient. Very good at bouncing back. And you have very good brains. I don’t know what Erskine’s serum did to your brains, but it seems to be. Making the healing process faster than. Normal. I can tell you more tomorrow. You did very well; I know it can be scary the first time. Would you like to hold Algernon?”

Alpha blinked, certain he must have misheard. But then Friedberg took her rat from Ramirez's hands and held it out to Alpha. “His name is Algernon. He is. Smarter than some of my grad students.” He accepted the warm, furry body and let the rodent sniff his hands, his wrists. Bucky peered down at it curiously and, very slowly, very gently, rubbed his right index finger between round, pink ears. Friedberg beamed. “I rescued him from the biology lab at my. Alma Mater about two years ago. He was the star of my learning experiments, and he has a lovely rat brain in his head.” Algernon’s whiskers twitched and he sniffed Bucky’s hand. He scurried up Alpha’s arm, tiny rat nails digging into his skin in a serious of quick pricks, up his arm and onto his shoulder. He nosed briefly at Alpha’s ear and the man cringed, only just refraining from squeaking. Friedman chuckled. “He likes you!” She extricated the rodent from Alpha’s shoulder and replaced him back on her own. “Perhaps in the future. I will introduce you two to the Rat Park. That is where I keep the rats. I rescue from Biology departments across the world. I am. Currently banned from no fewer than four universities in the free world. Not that anyone can prove anything. You two have a good day.” On that note she left their cell, and the harried army of lab coats trundled the equipment away and Ramirez left on their tail after bidding the Winter Soldiers a good day as well.

Once safely alone again, with the cell door locked between them and the world, Bucky turned to Alpha with a raised eyebrow. “Huh.”

“Huh,” Alpha agreed.

“I want one.”

Alpha frowned at him. “You can’t have an Algernon. Where would we keep him?”

“In my hair,” Bucky answered with a completely straight face. “It’s a rat’s nest half of the time anyway.”

Alpha scowled.  

 

It would end up being a busy day for Alpha and Beta, or perhaps for Steve and Bucky. Not quite an hour after Friedman and her equipment left did Ramirez return for Bucky. “We’re just going to do some quick cognitive tests down in one of the labs, to gauge how you process and retain information.” When they stared at him and refused to move, he relented. “Both of you can come, but you’re going to be bored so bring a book. Don’t look at me like that, it’s perfectly safe. Kinda tedious, but harmless.”

If Alpha-maybe-Steve was expecting a sterile room with a metal table, cinderblock walls and the smell of bleach, he was surprised by the bright little room Ramirez took them to instead. It was small, crowded by an oversized round table and two wheelie chairs. The walls were covered in some kind of noise dampening carpet, softer than the carpet underfoot. There was a mostly empty metal bookcase with a few yellowed pieces of printer paper, a few writing utensils and a paperclip occupying one of the shelves, and an innocuous cabinet left partially ajar. One wall of the room was dedicated to a pane of black glass—a two-way mirror so someone in the next room could observe them at work. “This is where the magic happens,” Ramirez told them dryly. “We used to keep rat subjects and Skinner boxes in here, which is why it smells like this, but they kept disappearing into Friedberg’s lab so SHIELD cut the funding to most those experiments. Captain, you’re going to be in the next room. I have it set up so that you can’t see into here and we can’t see into there, but if there’s a problem the sergeant can knock on the glass and you can come in. None of the doors are locked. After we run the battery with the sergeant we’ll run through with the captain.”

Alpha took the adjacent room and, unable to watch and not particularly interested in the paperback Ramirez insisted he bring, he sat cross legged on the floor and waited. The observation room was similar to the adjoining lab: carpeted walls, black glass on one side, mostly empty bookcase, slightly ajar cabinet. He pressed an ear to the wall. The sound in the lab was dampened, but the walls had not been soundproofed and he could hear the drone of Ramirez speaking evenly, the occasional silences he left for Bucky to answer (and he rarely spoke). To his knowledge, Bucky was in no danger, so he settled down to wait.

In the other room, Bucky weathered the testing. Some of it was familiar: Ramirez told him to remember a handful of words (staple, igloo, marmalade, lofty) which was a standard measurement used after head injuries to make sure the Asset could still retain the mission imperative. But then he presented Bucky with a page of illustrated apples to count, and okay, that was weird but okay. And then he was given page after page of abstract, colorful shapes and asked completely nonsensical questions like “Which one is the angry one?” Bucky had never met an angry parallelogram, so he tried to pick the most aggressive-looking shape in the bunch. After that Ramirez put new pictures in front of him, invariably portraying daunting little scenes of people doing the kind of things people do. “Okay, I need you to tell me what’s going on in this picture.”

Bucky stared at the scene. It showed a boy, maybe a young teenager, holding a horn, a clarinet? and looking at another person, his father maybe. Bucky reported what he saw in the dull, inflectionless rhythm of a field report and Ramirez listened attentively. “Why is the boy looking at the man, Sergeant?”

Bucky blinked and shrugged, at a loss. Ramirez waited patiently. “I don’t know,” he replied, suddenly annoyed in spite of himself. “It doesn’t say.”

“What do you think they might say to each other? There’s no wrong answers, here.”

Bucky glared at the picture. “I don’t know,” he gritted out. “Maybe the kid hates his clarinet and doesn’t want to be anyone’s stupid clarinet player. And maybe the dad’s about to beat the tar outta him for being ungrateful.” Bucky ground his teeth together and sank into his chair a little further. He wanted to rap on the window, or maybe just get up and let the armed guards walk him back to the room, but then Ramirez had taken the picture and slid it under the growing pile of materials on the round table and had picked out a new one.

He lifted it up. “What do you see?”

He squinted. “Uh, someone made a mess and got ink all over your paper there.”

Ramirez’s mouth twitched upward. “It’s an inkblot test. I know some of these things can be kind of frustrating, but you’re doing exactly what you should be doing. Just about any answer you give is going to be the right one. This test right here is just to see how you think about abstract concepts, and the properties you freely attribute to visual stimuli.” He shrugged and presented the picture again. “What do you see?”

“A spider.” A new card with a different inkblot appeared. “A mask.” A new card appeared. “Fl…flowers.” A new card. “Blood spatter.” A new card. “Blood spatter.” A new card. “Blood spatter.” A new card. “Goat face.”

When they finished with the inkblot cards, Ramirez collected the materials they had gone through and set them aside. “There’s another battery of tests waiting for you, but we can do those tomorrow. It’s a little bit much to do all at once. And you did do really well today. Dr. Guthman and I are going to look over your responses tonight and do a quick write up for you tomorrow if you want to see it. Do you remember those words I told you not to forget?”

“Staple, igloo, marmalade, lofty,” Bucky recited dully.

“Perfect. You’re free to go. Send in Captain Rogers on your way out, will ya?”

Alpha took Bucky’s abandoned seat and it was more of the same. Memorize these words (fish, casual, street lamp, universal), count illustrated apples on the page, followed by pointing out shapes with unusual characteristics. “How am I supposed to know which shape is angry?” Alpha-but-feeling-strangely-Steve-like demanded.

“Which one _seems_ angry?” Ramirez hedged smoothly. “Obviously pictures aren’t going to be exactly emotive, but if you had to pick, which one would it be?”

After those were done Alpha-feeling-more-Asset-like rattled off the bare bones description of the picture Ramirez gave him. The psychologist hummed noncommittally. “Why do you think that is?”

Alpha blinked at him. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I have insufficient data. I don’t know anything about these people.”

“Well, what do you think? There are no wrong answers here.”

Alpha lifted his shoulders to his ears and let them drop, at a loss. Ramirez waited. Alpha chewed his cheek. “Maybe. The kid is tired of playing the clarinet. Maybe he feels like…he outgrew the band, or he doesn’t like how they treat him and he’s ready for something else.”

“Yeah?”

“And the adult, the dad I guess, isn’t happy about it.”

“How come?”

Alpha shrugged again. “He doesn’t think it’s the kid’s choice to make. And he doesn’t agree with it.” He sank into his chair, feeling suddenly exhausted.

“Almost done,” Ramirez promised, setting the picture aside and picking up a card. “What do you see?”

Alpha stared, bewildered. “Um. An ink stain.”

“You’re not wrong,” he chuckled. “What does it look like to you?”

He resisted the sinking feeling in his gut. “It doesn’t look like anything. It’s just. It’s a mess.”

Ramirez bobbed his head thoughtfully. “I think I know what you see. It’s okay. I see it too.”

“You don’t.” It came out fast and hard and cold, because no. Just no.

“I do,” Ramirez repeated softly. “Every time I close my eyes some days. And I can’t give anything away, but the sergeant? I think he puts on a brave face, but you two share more in common than you realize. So. What do you see?”

He steeled himself. “Blood spatter.” Ramirez tucked the card into the pile of materials and withdrew another one. “A face.” A new card. “Blood spatter, the kind from a knife.” A new card. “Blood spatter.” Another. “Blood spatter.” Another. “Butterfly.” Another. “Blood." Always blood. At the end Alpha recited the words he was meant to retain, and then  he rejoined Bucky in the next room.

They returned to their cell in silence, and found one Bruce Banner waiting for them inside. He sat on the island, the only place in the room to sit that wasn’t a bare mattress. He wore a puce button down and tan slacks, both of which looked like he had gotten them second or third hand from a man larger than himself. The armed guards left the three alone inside and locked the door behind themselves.

“Hey,” Banner said. He seemed about as lost as they felt, and he kicked his feet idly, let the backs of his heels bump the drawers of the island. “I just wanted to see how you two were doing.” They stared at him. “Okay. So how are you two doing? I see they put you in one room. Save on the electric bill, I guess. Um. I noticed they gave you some puzzles, which is good.” He cast around for a moment. “I like your mattress fort.”

Alpha cleared his throat a little. “What…Did you need anything?”

“Me? No. No. I just wanted to make sure you two were okay. I mean, you’re practically Avengers, and I’m practically an Avenger and we should stick together.”

“You _are_ an Avenger,” Alpha told him.

“Yeah. Okay.”

The Winter Soldiers considered him for a long moment. Never had Alpha encountered someone so aggressively unhappy (who would survive an encounter with the Winter Soldier) and, in times of crisis when no course of action presents itself, he tended to turn to Bucky. On cue, Bucky marched into the room, trying not to feel Banner’s eyes on him while he retrieved the new puzzle box from the pile of used ones and presented it to the doctor. “Can you explain this shit to me?” he growled.

Twenty minutes later the three of them sat on the floor in a sea of solid green puzzle pieces, swearing and pushing the pieces around and around. “Fuck this one,” Bucky grumbled, pushing a piece toward Bruce. “And fuck this one. And fuck this one, too. And fuck _you_ very much.”

“I don’t want them!” Bruce snorted. “This puzzle is bad for my blood pressure.” He took his growing pile of pieces and pushed them toward Alpha-feeling-pretty-Stevie.

Steve lifted one of the pieces and threw it at Bucky. “Do you see this punk?” Bucky whined, and then the pieces started to fly in earnest. That was how the armed guards found them: Steve using Bucky’s mattress to block most of the projectiles, Bucky crouched behind the bivouac like a fort and Bruce behind the island, watching more than participating. The door to the cell creaked open and one of the guards peered inside. There was a moment of puzzle piece cease-fire.

The guard cleared her throat. “Dr. Banner, we’re here to escort Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes to see Dr. Guthman.”

“Right. Right.” Bruce got to his feet and pushed his glasses up his nose a bit. “I’ll just be going then. See what Tony’s been up to.” He waved at the Winter Soldiers with a tight, unsure smile. “See you around, I guess.”

Bruce went his own way, going wherever it was Bruce Banners go when not being pelted by green puzzle pieces thrown by amnesiac (recovering) super soldiers, and the Winter Soldiers were herded to the interviewing room with its flimsy metal chairs and foldable table. Guthman and Ramirez waited for them there.

“Have you given any thought about what you want to be called?” she asked when they took their seats opposite the psychologists.

“Bucky is fine for me,” Bucky told them.

“And I can be Steve,” Alpha said. It did not matter to him what people called him, and if he did not always feel like a Steve, well, what’s in a name, really?

Guthman nodded. “Dr. Friedberg is very pleased with the scans she was able to take.”

Ramirez chuckled. “Her phone’s wallpaper has a selfie of her and her daughter, but she might put your guys’ brains there instead.”

“She really loves neuroscience,” Guthman added dryly. “From what I was able to pry out of her, it sounds like the extensive damage to your frontal lobes is healing nicely and you should start to remember past experiences. It’s too soon to say if you’ll remember everything, but it’s a distinct possibility. What have you started to remember?”

Alpha’s hands tightened on his knees. Beside him, Bucky’s metal plates shifted and resettled along his arm. The silence stretched. The psychologists did not seem to mind it and gave every indication that they could wait all day for the soldiers to fill it. They sat in their uncomfortable metal chairs and waited while the quiet pressed in on them. Bucky shifted, ran a hand through his hair, chewed his lip. He cleared his throat. “I, uh, I remember some of the early days. After. It’s not good stuff. I’m not going to talk about it.”

“We don’t have to get into the particulars today,” Guthman told him when it became obvious he wasn’t going to say any more. “When we’re done here I’m going to send you back to your room with a couple notebooks so you can record the memories you regain and the thoughts and feelings you have about them. You seem like you have something to add, Steve.”

He grit his teeth, but relented. “I don’t. Have those.”

She frowned. “Can you elaborate, please?”

How to explain to a person that the Asset lacks proper feelings and thoughts? He glanced at Bucky, but there was no help there. “I don’t really have... I’m not like Bucky. I wasn’t a person Before. I always worked for Hydra.” He winced, waiting for the rebuke, for the psychologists to argue. Ramirez looked more confused than angry, though, and Guthman only continued to exude effortless professionalism. Bucky looked annoyed.

“What are you talking about, pal?” he asked, eyebrow raised in the patented Bucky-Barnes-is-not-amused expression.

“I told you. Captain America, Steve Rogers, they were just covers. I was a plant for Hydra. I sold war bonds so they could fund their research, and I duped you into joining the Commandoes, and you got wrangled into the Winter Soldier program. Because of me.”

“That sounds like quite an amount of responsibility for one operative,” Guthman said before Bucky could interject.

“You don’t believe him!” Bucky snapped, more an order than a reproach. He drummed his metal fingers on the table. “That’s. That’s _crap_ , Rogers. We grew up together. I went to war and you went to Erskine, and yeah, I don’t think we’ve had a proper moment to argue about that but it’s coming up, pal. And then I fell off that fucking train, right, and you fell in the stupid ocean, right, and then Hydra musta hauled you out. So tell me when Hydra had the opportunity to whack Steve Rogers and put in a plant, okay, because I ain’t seeing it.”

Alpha hunched in on himself. “Hydra is everywhere.”

“No! This is what happened. You put your plane in the water, right, and we’re going to have a fight about that pretty soon here too. You put it in the water and then Hydra extracts you. And you’re dead on paper, but still kickin’. And I don’t know what they did to you, but if it was anything like they did to me it was bad. And you musta resisted them like a champ, okay, because I was broken. In every sense of the word.

“They broke me, Steve. They broke me and explained they needed me to see you and agree to everything they said in front of you. And I couldn’t say no—I’m not that good. So I did. They lied to you, and they made me lie to you, and they put this story in your head and they made me collaborate it because they knew you would listen to me.” Bucky got to his feet and paced the room, breathing hard. “And what they did to me, they did to you times ten, because they used your only weakness against you. They used me to get to you. They took the person that you were, and you _were a person_ everyone knows it but you, dumbass—they took the person you were and they broke him, and they put something else in. They lied to you, Steve. I lied to you.” He pressed a hand to his face, looking suddenly as tired and broken as Alpha felt. “They pulled you out and they put in a story that you would believe if I supported it, and it made you their weapon, completely under their control. And it’s on me.”

“It’s really not,” Alpha snapped before he could check himself. The empty metal chair went flying, slammed into the wall. The psychologists tensed.

Bucky sucked in a deep breath and let it out through pursed lips, standing perfectly still, deceptively calm. “It’s on me,” he repeated. “I’m supposed to look after you. I pulled you out of alley fights when you weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, and I watched your six in Europe. And you like that big metal shield of yours pretty well, but I was your first shield. And I let you down because I dunno what I’m made of, but it sure ain’t vibranium. So yeah, it’s on me.” The Winter Soldiers stared at one another for a long moment.

“It sounds like you think about it a lot,” Ramirez said quietly.

Bucky gave a bark of unhappy laughter and shook his head. “All this time this dumb punk thought he was the reason I was there, like Captain America just goes around recruiting for Hydra when it was the other way around.”

“What would have happened if you had not lied?” Guthman asked. All eyes landed on her. “What would have happened if you hadn’t told Steve that he was a plant for Hydra, that he belonged to them? Would he have been able to leave?”

Bucky’s face scrunched up, but Alpha answered. “I wouldn’t have been able to walk away. They would have just kept breaking me down until I either died or complied.”

“That sounds like it would be painful.”

“Yeah.” Alpha pushed the memories down deep. He lived through it once; he didn’t need to do it again.

“It sounds like there weren’t very many options,” Ramirez pushed. “You two were just doing what you needed to survive, and resisting every inch of the way anyway.”

“Maybe,” Bucky muttered, not looking at any of them. He glanced at the metal door and clenched and unclenched his fists, but he had yet to make his way over and rap his knuckles against the metal surface to be let out. 

Ramirez rested his chin in his hand. “So, I have to ask, because it’s been bothering me since I met you two.” The Winter Soldiers steeled themselves for the worst. “Why is Bucky’s hair so long, but Steve’s is short?”

They watched him for a beat, half expecting a punchline that he never gave. “Between missions, out of cryo, we have to submit for maintenance,” Alpha explained, adopting the dull, inflectionless Asset tone. “And I can usually stay still long enough for someone to cut my hair, but Beta, _Bucky_ , doesn’t like sharp objects by his face.”

He scowled. “Rogers over here thinks he can lead by example, but I’m not letting anyone put a razor by my head. I’ve seen too many perfectly good ears get cut clean off that way. No.”

And that led to a brief, stilted discussion of the maintenance process, and cryo, and an even briefer description of the Chair. Bucky paced the room, agitated but not angry while Alpha answered questions carefully. The psychologists did not seem especially interested in recreating the process for themselves, but kept asking questions about their subjective experience. “And what was that like? What was going through your head? What did it feel like? And then what happened?”

Towards the end, Guthman leaned back in her chair. “It sounds like you hated it.”

Alpha blinked. “It was unpleasant,” he hedged.

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ in there.”

“But it was necessary,” he admitted, eyes trained on the table. “We were erratic, nonfunctional if the proper measures were not taken.”

“Erratic how?”

He thought for a long moment. He thought of a woman who walked, tall and strong, down a dirt road. He thought of trees that reminded him of places he never visited before. He thought of forgotten melodies and half-remembered turns of phrase and languages that had no business falling from his mouth. He thought of the warm press of a mouth over his own and stubble scraping across his cheek, and what it would be like to have his arm forcibly removed from him. Alpha swallowed. “I would have… lapses, I guess. Sometimes I would leave my post, or disappear, and even now I don’t remember why I did it or what I did. Sometimes I would do or say something I shouldn’t have.” They nodded encouragingly. “I might lapse into English when I should have been speaking German or French. I would call someone by the wrong name, or fire at someone’s chest when I should have been going for headshots. I was…troublesome?”

“It sounds like you were reverting back into what you always were, Captain Rogers,” Guthman told him. “You make it sound like you were a weapon trying to be a person, but really you were a person who was tricked into being a weapon.”

“I am a weapon,” he sighed, ignoring the teeth of frustration sinking into his brain.

“I’m not going to tell you what to think,” she replied evenly. “But to my knowledge, weapons don’t need to be electrocuted, tortured, lied to and manipulated. Those sound like things reserved for people who need to be tricked into becoming weapons to nefarious ends. I’ll let you reflect on that tonight. Do you have anything to add, Bucky?” Bucky shook his head, arms crossed, still pacing by the door but not knocking to be let out. Guthman took out two composition books and a pair of plastic ballpoint pens and set them on the table. “We covered a lot of ground in this session, and I want to thank you both for sharing what you were able to. There are going to be things you don’t want to share with me, and that is fine. Go ahead and take these notebooks: you can record your thoughts and feelings and memories in them, and you do not need to share your notebooks with anyone—I might never see these again. They are as private as you want them to be. All I ask is that you make use of them. That will be your homework for tonight. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

They took their notebooks and pens and marched back to their cell and sat in silence for a long, long time. Bucky sat on his mattress and Alpha had taken the floor space between bivouac and wall. Alpha did not set pen to paper, but he did turn the writing utensil over and over between his fingers. The slender line of plastic was lethal in his hands, but it was meant for creative purposes; Guthman obviously made a mistake giving it to him. He could not write about the thoughts or feelings he did not have. But perhaps he could darken the pages of his notebook with the blue ink in another way. The pen turned over and over in his hand. After some time Bucky wet his lips and turned to the other Winter Soldier, almost reluctantly. “Human lapses.”

Alpha stirred from his reverie. “What?”

“You said lapses, earlier. We had human lapses if we went too long without cryo or the Chair.”

“Yeah.”

Bucky got to his feet and paced a few times around their cell, arms tightly crossed. He did a few circuits, paused, and then stepped up to Alpha. He knelt on the hard floor and took the blond man’s face between his palms, one hand warm and rough, the other cool and smooth. “Do you ever think about the conditioning Hydra does to us?”

He blinked. “Um, not really. That’s the point: they condition us and no one has to think about it again.”

“Right, but it’s an awful lot of work, isn’t it? Especially since it goes to pieces any time we go on longer missions. From the minute they pull us from cryo, there’s a deadline we gotta meet so they can wipe us and put us away.”

“Yes,” Alpha said slowly. “That’s why there’s correction for untimely missions.”

“Because the conditioning breaks down over time.” Bucky brushed his flesh fingers through Alpha’s hair. “Remember when I couldn’t do this?”

Alpha let his eyelids droop. He was so tired. “They caught us once, didn’t they?”

“They left us alone, not long after they started putting us on missions together again, and someone saw me giving you head,” Bucky answered, voice sardonic, more than a little bitter.

“I forgot.” But now he remembered the smell of old paper and the way dust motes fell in the air, and he had forgotten what it was like to have someone touch him without violence, that there could be physical contact without someone dying in a pool of red at the end of it.

“It was a human lapse,” Bucky continued. Had his blue eyes always looked so dark? “And they skipped correction and went straight into conditioning, not that there was much of a difference.”

“They made me watch.” He didn’t want to remember. He squeezed his eyes shut against the memory.

“And then they made me watch.” He let the pad of his thumb brush over Alpha’s lower lip. “And we must have gone on a thousand missions at least where we couldn’t hardly look at each other without getting nauseous.”

“That’s when you started to get snippy with hair cutting.”

“Now is not the time for puns, Rogers. So we go on easily a billion missions where we can’t stand each other, and it’s fine because you’re a hand-to-hand combatant and I’m a sniper. But then, after a billion wipes and a billion years in cryo and a billion successful missions, the conditioning starts to deteriorate. And then one mission, it was a nasty one, they left us alone for just a minute and you started to clean some of the gravel out of my face.”

“It was bothering me.”

“Sorry to offend,” Bucky snorted. “And it hurt. You brushing dirt out of my open wounds hurt, like being dragged over hot coals, but I could tell most of it was in my mind.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Shut up. But the thing was, you did that and there were no real consequences, and then ever since, after a mission you would do something like that.” Bucky stared at him hard.

“On a few of the missions they would reward us with something stupid,” Alpha explained. “One time it was a little square of chocolate, and once I think it was champagne. We weren’t usually rewarded with stuff like that, but sometimes we were, and I would look at you, and I realized I should be rewarding you, too.”

“Why?”

“I’m your C.O.”

“You’re not my C.O.”

Alpha rolled his eyes. “I am definitely your C.O. and you’re my sniper, and our handlers could reward us with chocolate or whatever, and I had nothing to give you. So I cleaned out your wounds when I could, because I figured I’m a hell of a lot nicer than the med team or the technicians. But half the time, you didn’t get wounded.”

“I love sniping.”

“And throughout the wipes and cryo and whatever programming they put us through, I never got this idea out of my head that my sniper needs to be rewarded for successful missions. It was like I conditioned myself, but with fewer electrodes.”

“You used to touch my hair.”

Alpha allowed himself a half smile and brushed one of the brown locks behind Bucky’s ear. “I did. And then we had that mission that went to hell.”

“Was that the one where you tried to punch out a tank?”

“No, the one where your nest caught fire and you were late to extraction.”

“That mission was terrible,” Bucky agreed.

“But then you made extraction, because I was not going to leave without you, and you were okay. I couldn’t believe it. So I made some flimsy excuse to get you alone and I planted one on you.”

“That was surreal,” Bucky recalled. “First I escape getting fried just by the skin of my teeth, and then the Winter Soldier pins me against the side of a truck and presses his face to my face.”

“You smelled like kerosene.”

“I’m sure I did. I always wondered about that, but I never wanted to ask.”

Alpha leaned forward and closed the inches of distance between them and let his lips press against Bucky’s for a long moment. He let his nose brush against Bucky’s when they parted. “I’m not stopping the kissing thing. If you make it back to me alive you get a kiss.”

He smirked. “And if they put us through another round of conditioning?”

“I’ll just have to get the Bucky Bear to kiss you.”

“You are such a punk.”

“That is no way to talk to your commanding officer, jerk.”

“Not my C.O.”

“Always your C.O.”

They fell asleep on the spare mattress behind the bivouac, too tired to argue any more. Bucky pressed himself along Alpha’s back, and if they needed an excuse they might have said something about fitting on one mattress or conserving body heat. No one asked for excuses. Alpha listened to Bucky’s deep, even breathing, let the comforting weight of his metal arm around his middle ground him. _My first shield,_ he thought while he drifted. He curled up a little bit, as if to make himself smaller. _My friend,_ he corrected himself before the black waters of sleep swept him away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rat in this chapter is named after the rat in "Flowers for Algernon," a novel that will give you all the feels and also deals with transcendence, becoming more than what your lot in life would normally allow, as well as soul-crushing loss, death of loved ones, and exploration of the upper limites of human compassion and cruelty.  
> Dr. Friedberg is loosely based on one of my favorite instructors. Her speech patters are impossible to express in text, but I did the best I could.  
> Rats disappearing from psychology labs before they can be shuttled to biology departments is a real thing! After rats have been studied for their cognitive functions, they can no longer be studied by psychologists (as experienced rats will exhibit different behavior than unexperienced rats on any given task, skewing the data and introducing confounds to an otherwise perfectly good experiment). Over the course of the experiments, however, psychologists will tend to form attachments to their subjects and in lieu of allowing them to be dissected, radiated, starved and generally treated like, well, lab rats by biologists, psychologists will spirit their ex-subjects away to loving homes.  
> Rat Park, to my knowledge, is not a real place, but it almost was! A few notable psychologists (whose names escape me and I am not looking up right now) did studies in which they placed rat subjects in fantastic environments. Imagine the rat equivalent of Six Flags or Cedar Pointe. That happened in real life for the sake of science. Rats in social, colorful, stimulating environments tend to be smarter, gentler and more relaxed than their counterparts relegated to boring, sterile, isolating environments. These findings happen to be generalizeable to humans, which would be why Guthman in the chapter previous intriduced colorful, cognitively stimulating elements into the Winter Soldiers' environment, and also why she tries to encourage interaction between the Soldiers and literally anyone else (Bruce Banner and other psychologists so far).  
> If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment. If you have criticisms, please meet me in your local Denny's parking lot where I will be waiting, ready to fight you, with my tiny, tiny fists.


	6. Not a Good Man, but a Perfect Soldier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky’s chest ached to look at him, because Ramirez would not survive an encounter with Hydra’s extraction team.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was really difficult for me to write, and it may be difficult to read. Brace yourself for violence, death, and politics.

When faced with well-meaning laymen, Erskine found himself prone to fanciful turns of phrase. The scientific kerfuffle that turned Schmidt into the Red Skull was complicated to describe, and Erskine’s fears for future trials could be pinned into an easy-to-grasp idea for a young Steve Rogers. He told him that the serum amplified everything about the subject, from the inside out, so that good became great and bad became worse.

This is, of course, horseshit.

In truth the super soldier serum did not amplify a subject’s intentions, did not strengthen his moral code, could not select or circumvent his life’s work. The serum was a collection of chemicals, injected into Steven Rogers and then shot through with vita-rays for good measure. Mysticism might have lurked in the cockles of Erskine’s heart, but it did not have a place in his research. No, the serum could never amplify everything that Johann Schmidt, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were. They simply did the amplifying themselves.

The Red Skull was an evil, brilliant, elitist, insane son of a bitch before he ever met Erskine, but the devastating loss of his Aryan visage during Hitler’s rise to power might have given him the nudge he needed to break Hydra from the Fuhrer’s grip. The serum made him physically strong, and it may have even sharpened his cognitive functions, but Schmidt was no more evil when fighting Captain America on the _Valkyrie_ than he had been hunched over a work bench with his white lab coat tossed over the back of his chair. All he needed to get from Point A to Point B was a nudge, a defining moment, and the serum provided that nudge.

Likewise, the bastardized serum administered to one Sergeant Barnes during his time as a POW in Italy changed the man in ways so subtle as to escape even Peggy Carter’s notice. This would be because Bucky was not amplified by the serum—he was still the same Bucky. Perhaps he was quieter, a little edgier, and always a killer shot, but there was nothing fundamentally different in him. He continued to follow orders (provided they were not completely stupid), watch Steve’s back, tell dirty jokes, and do the things that Bucky Barneses do.

Project Rebirth counted as a success for a variety of reasons, mostly because the subject A: Did not die, and B: Went on to become Captain America. Steve Rogers was a changed man post serum. His lungs worked. His back straightened. He stood tall, with arms that could beat down the obstacles standing between him and where he wanted to go and legs that could take him there. Someone who might not know better would say that the serum must have amplified his goodness, and they would be wrong. The serum only provided him with the means to do the things he always wanted to do, or tried to do before. No one could prepare for the kind of terror that is a Steven Rogers with full lung capacity and a soapbox to stand on.

“You can’t have pineapple bits in the green Jell-O. It’s uncivilized.” Bucky levelled a look at him but kept his peace. “And why is it green Jell-O? What even flavor is that? Green flavor? With pineapple pieces in it.” Alpha’s face twisted unhappily as he stabbed at the offending dessert, having already cleared the rest of his tray. He scooped the green-flavored gelatin into his face and scowled while he swallowed it down.

“Better than cold spam,” Bucky told him. The words came out slow, stilted, like he needed to select them one by one and they hurt on their way out.

“As long as it wasn’t green flavored too.” Alpha shifted, uncomfortable, pushing his remaining food around the tray. He wet his lips and looked up at Bucky, looked away and back. “Is something wrong?” he finally spat out.

Bucky did not look at him. “I am functional.”

Alpha squinted. “Report.”

The Red Room and Hydra made him an elite operative: his hands remained open, his jaw unclenched, shoulders loose. But Alpha knew when his other half was fine and when he was trying to pass as fine, and this attempt at passing would not do. “I am undamaged,” he reported, dull, robotic.

Alpha watched him for a long moment. “You’re remembering.” At that, Bucky hunched in on himself and pressed the heel of his metal hand against one eye socket.

“Never thought I’d miss the Chair,” he barked, half a laugh and half a sob.

“What do you remember?” Alpha asked, queasiness clutching his stomach. He made no move to approach the other Winter Soldier—this long out of cryo, they were bound to have human lapses, and a great many lapses ended in bloodshed.

Bucky shook his head, his long hair flopped over his face as a curtain between him and the cell. Alpha got up and padded to the island where they left their composition notebooks, took Bucky’s and one of the pens and brought it to where he curled up. “You don’t have to say anything,” he told him, and carefully slid the materials to him.

He shook his head again. “I don’t want to remember,” he rasped.

“I’m sorry.”

An empty platitude, but Bucky sucked in a breath as if struck. He didn’t say anything, but after a while he took the notebook, opened it to the first page and started writing. Alpha sat across the cell to give him some semblance of privacy (and when had privacy ever been a concern?). He took his own notebook off the island not long after Bucky flipped his page over and started writing along the back. He sat with his back pressed against the cold cell wall, turned the pen over and over between his fingers, his notebook opened to the first page, blank, waiting. Sometimes for missions he needed to recreate maps from memory and he found himself doing just that, sketching out the rough grid that was ground zero for the Chitauri invasion. He found himself sketching the shape of Stark Tower in the margin. He found himself wishing for something finer than a ballpoint pen, and the Winter Soldier does not express preferences, but if asked he might have grudgingly admitted a desire for a graphite pencil and a pink rubber eraser, maybe some charcoal.

Alpha sketched metal plates and a scratched elbow joint when the steady scritch of pen across paper halted on the other side of their cell. He looked up in silent askance, but Bucky did not look at him; he kept his eyes on the middle distance, pen held loosely in his hand, mouth pursed. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he would not say for what. “I’m sorry.”

That was how Tony Stark found them. He stormed into their cell, every line of his body tense, eyes hard. Bucky froze, going sniper still but without a scope, no rifle pressed to his shoulder. Alpha was on his feet and every cell in his body screamed for him to attack, to intervene, but Stark came without his armor and the soft part of him, the part that could not be carved away, burnt out or electrified into compliance, screamed even louder for him to check himself. Still, he had a broad palm pressed over the hard arc reactor to pause Stark’s forward momentum.

“You bastards!” he snarled, eyes pinning Alpha and lips peeled back from his teeth. He shoved the super solder off and Alpha allowed himself to be moved, lest this turn into a fist fight.

Stark looked bad, not only like he had not been sleeping, but like he had not been eating either. His lips were cracked, dark circles bruised under his blood shot eyes, his hair stood on end in places. He looked like he had not touched razor to skin in at least two days, and unruly stubble shadowed his neck, corrupted his otherwise immaculate goatee. His t-shirt was rumpled, probably from sleeping in it, and a distinct set of scorch marks stained the legs of his faded jeans, as if he recently used a welding torch carelessly. All this Alpha took in with a single glance, his eyes sweeping the maddened Ironman from head to toe, but the most prominent discordant note in the mosaic that should have been Tony Stark was the smell.

“Have you been drinking?” Alpha asked, oddly detached from the situation. He should be aggravated that Stark ran into his cell, armor or no armor, but he just…wasn’t. Perhaps this should be some kind of betrayal—the man had brought him sandwiches barely half a week ago, and fixed Bucky’s arm, and now he cussed them out like a man on fire. Then again, in Alpha’s admittedly limited experience, kind gestures typically evaporated in no time at all and the true person underneath the promising façade would reveal himself. Alpha suspected that the real Tony Stark showed himself at last: an unwell, drunken billionaire with no sense of self preservation.

“Don’t change the subject!” Stark snapped and jabbed a finger into Alpha’s chest. “I was looking into some bootleg Hydra files and guess what I saw? Don’t answer that—it was rhetorical. Does the name Howard Stark mean anything to you?”

Alpha thought of cigarette smoke and engine grease, a trim mustache and the promise of mischief and too many words strung together. He thought of a car that couldn’t fly, and a military plane that certainly could, and the sound of enemy fire and the clench of a missed opportunity before plummeting into what surely must have been certain death for a lesser operative. The part of his brain that was still the Asset, or at least reliably Asset-like, spun and extrapolated. “Your father?” he hazarded.

“ _Ding ding ding_! We got a winner!” Stark sneered. “Bonus points for anyone that can guess how he died.”

Alpha didn’t hear Bucky approach, but then the other Winter Soldier insinuated his body between Stark and Alpha. “Unmarked lead slug, Soviet rifling.” He tapped a metal finger between his eyes. “Right here. Shot from 600 feet, then placed in the car. An easy push through a break in the guard rail. A spark and some gasoline takes care of clean up.”

Stark actually took a step back, and something in his face tipped Alpha off that he was fully aware of his mortality. Bucky’s dead, rote tone, the clinical way he dealt out details of that particular mission report had a way of making the Winter Soldier very real. Perhaps it was a mark of Stark’s bravery or, more likely, a mark of his foolishness that he stood his ground. “He was your friend! I grew up on stories about Captain America and Bucky Barnes. My dad—he never shut up about you guys.”

Bucky stared back, unblinking. “The Winter Soldier has no friends. Only targets and handlers.”

“That’s…” Stark sucked in a breath. “That’s bullshit!”

“That’s the way it is,” Bucky corrected. Stark radiated unhappiness before, but that simple statement seemed to gut him. Alpha watched him reel and, not for the first time, he reflected that as an Avenger Ironman could be his next target. Banner demonstrated his apparent imperviousness to both normal and extraterrestrial weapons, the Black Widow and Hawkeye should be in the wind if they have any sense, Thor and his brother moved off world possibly permanently. Stark was the most obvious next step—a conclusion so forgone Alpha should wrap his hands around his throat right now if only to save time.

But Hydra would come for them and the Winter Soldiers must maintain some semblance of cover, and Tony Stark, Avenger or not, was a civilian, and civilians (who are soft and just a little stupid) must be (taken care of?) accounted for, lest their actions become unpredictable and inconvenient. No, Stark should remain alive until he becomes too cumbersome, or until Pierce gives the kill order.

 

“Ah, Doctor Guthman! I was hoping to have a word with you.”

Guthman looked up from her intake paperwork and consciously unclenched her jaw. “Please have a seat, Agent Sitwell.”

He gingerly lowered himself on her empty guest chair and conspicuously avoided looking at the havoc that consisted of her office. “I’m surprised you know me by name.”

She did not deign to reply to a comment so obtuse. “What can I do for you, Mr. Sitwell?”

“I need the access codes for Containment Cell 229.”

“Why?”

“Fury needs the Winter Soldiers to undergo a battery of endurance training and medical tests.”

“I hadn’t heard anything about it.”

“It’s physical stuff—hardly your jurisdiction, Doctor.”

She stared back at him, face perfectly expressionless. Weariness dragged at her, and were she any less experienced she might have written it off as a midafternoon slump, or too many late nights in a row, or even on the turkey sandwich she inhaled for lunch. But she was too savvy to mistake this weariness on any of the usual culprits. She picked at it for a moment, like she would pick at a particularly tight knot in her shoelaces, all while Sitwell refrained from fidgeting in her gray little guest chair. Years of experience told her that this brand of weariness appeared in the presence of danger, a danger not her own, and were Sitwell a client she would have him subtly watched or would ask him about his plans for the future. But Sitwell was not her client and he was waiting in her gray chair with a polite expression that would pass as patient in the spy community. Guthman built a career on watching for the cracks in the most plastic of masks.

“I don’t think it’s wise to put Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes through any kind of physical regiment just yet. They’re still healing from the battle in Manhattan, not to mention the abuse Hydra put them through.”

His face never flickered, and the weary pull in the center of Guthman’s attention blared into red alarms. “According to the reports from med staff and Doctor Friedberg’s own notes, they seem to be mostly healed, at least outwardly. Of course, you can always call Director Fury if you still feel uneasy.”

Guthman drummed her nails against one of the few empty spaces on her desk and chewed her lip for a moment. The next step was hers to make, and she daren’t put a foot wrong. Logically she knew that Fury trusted Jasper Sitwell, that he had been an agent for SHIELD for some years now.

But she didn’t land a lucrative career with SHIELD by being stupid, and she didn’t live this long by ignoring her instincts, and right now her instincts were telling her that Sitwell was armed (most agents are) and that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and any attempt to put Fury between herself and him would be circumvented one way or another. Her instincts were telling her to put a sizeable distance between her and Sitwell, between Sitwell and the Winter Soldiers, come to that. “That won’t be necessary. I just need to fish out the access codes from this mess here.” She let her eyes light up. “In fact, would you mind terribly helping me clean up?” Before he could answer she dumped one of her many paper boxes on the floor and pushed it into his hands. “There may be some lifting involved. I’m an old bird—hardly a spring chicken. This one is going to be our throwaway box.”

“Doctor Guthman,” Sitwell smiled. “I’m afraid I have to go. I have…urgent business.”

She squinted at him. “It’ll take twice as long without you, Mr. Sitwell. Come on. A little elbow grease never hurt anyone.”

“I really must decline.” He edged his way closer to the door, still holding the empty paper box in front of him as a barrier between them. “But I will return later. When my duties allow. And also for the access codes. Excuse me.”

Guthman waited until his fleeing footsteps faded around the corner before she pulled out her phone and sent a text message to Dr. Friedman. It said simply: **the soldiers are compromised. employ drugstore maneuver.**

Halfway across the country, an agent who had fallen off the radar peered across the immaculate lawn to the only jogger out and about this early in the morning. She stank of blood, cement flooring and gunpowder when she limped into his path. He slowed to a brisk walk and then to a stop. Her eyes said “shellshock” but her words came quick and clear. “Everyone I know is trying to kill me. Can I use your phone?”

Sam Wilson let his gaze wander along his peripherals without turning his head. “Not everyone,” he assured her in an undertone. He pressed his dinky little Nokia into Natasha’s hand. “Is there anything I can do?”

 

Ramirez took Alpha and Bucky on a “fieldtrip” out of the base and to an elderly brick townhouse in a different part of the city. The trip was made without fanfare; the Soldiers’ cooperation so taken for granted that Alpha startled himself with the realization that they could break away if they wanted. With a probably unarmed Ramirez as their only supervision, it would take nothing to slip away into the current of pedestrians on the sidewalk and seek out the nearest Hydra safe house, make contact, await extraction there. Or, a treacherous part of him whispered, they could slip away and _not_ make contact, maybe steal into Coney Island or walk along the many lanes and avenues, sit outside a coffee shop and watch the people go by, find a place that sells sticks of charcoal and…and…

And what? Play at being people? Pretend to have feelings beside perfidious bloodlust, pretend to follow hopes and dreams like they aren’t just broken shells without Hydra’s influence giving them purpose? Should they buy land upstate and chase chickens? The Winter Soldier does not want. The Winter Soldier does not express preferences, and he certainly does not try to trick himself into thinking himself a person. Something like anger coiled tightly in his chest. He suspected most people were mostly good, or they tried to be (otherwise there would be so many more Winter Soldiers, the traitorous voice in his mind whispered). No, Alpha was not good. Something mutinous reared its head in Alpha’s soul, and now that he was beginning to remember, he knew that this wasn’t a new development. The darkness, the biting rage that swelled in his chest had been there since Before, since the beginning, when all he had to his name was small fists and a bad attitude in the back alleys of Brooklyn. This wasn’t something Zola or Erskine or any of the others that came after them were able to put in him; none of them could rip it out of him, either. _All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…_ Erskine looked upon him a millennium ago and saw a good man, but he was tricked by his long lashes and fair complexion, because Steven Grant Rogers was a monster, even then. And then Erskine gave him bigger fists, a body that could carry out his will, and the monster was made flesh.

“Cap?”

He raged inwardly, but his face betrayed nothing but the blankness Ramirez had become accustomed to. Alpha stirred from his contemplation and closed the distance between him and Bucky, climbed up the cement steps to the door the young psychologist held open for him. Alpha found himself taking point in the unfamiliar territory out of habit and though he did not look at Bucky he felt his comforting presence at his six. The Winter Soldier does not want—wanting is reserved for people—but if he could he would want…he grappled with the treacherous rage coiled so tight in his torso while Ramirez scurried down the hall, leading them into a cramped kitchen.

If he could want, he would want…

They walked through the kitchen and into a room that might have been two separate rooms at one point but had since been repurposed into—“Welcome to Rat Park,” Ramirez said with a chuckle.

The room was dominated from floor to ceiling by a conglomerate of wire cages, plastic tubing, and plywood planks, and a pervasive smell of many rats sharing living space. “What the hell?” Bucky muttered.

“Yeah, Doctor Friedberg is something of an animal hoarder, but she keeps their living space clean and she keeps them fed, so SHIELD is only too happy to turn a blind eye. Besides, where else would these little guys live? With me?” His lip curled. “Ugh. No thank you.”

Rat Park had a variety of tunnels and hiding places for its occupants, but there were also at least three “floors” that doubled as mazes, five shoebox-sized containers with levers Ramirez described as “Skinner boxes,” half a dozen hamster wheels (“And every single one of them squeaks.”) and gaily colored climbing ladders.

Alpha watched the rats mill about for a long minute before he gave words to the concern he and Bucky shared. “What is their purpose?”

Ramirez looked back at him blankly. “Purpose? They don’t have one. They’re pets.”

Alpha blinked. “Pets.” He turned the new information over in his brain, but it did not fit nicely with his understanding of the world. “But what do they do?”

“Eat and crap, mostly. Um, I guess they’re companionable. That’s what pets are for: companionship.”

“I see,” Alpha lied. “They must all be very companionable.”

“Not really. That white one with the black spots is a real nasty piece of work to anyone who isn’t Doctor Friedberg. It had brain surgery in some bio lab and whatever they took out, it hasn’t been quite right ever since.”

Bucky nodded somberly and dipped his metal hand into the central cage, lifting out Algernon and cupping the snuffling rodent in his palms. “Why do you have a damaged animal?” he asked. Algernon nosed at his wrists and scurried up his flesh forearm.

Ramirez frowned. “Damage doesn’t really come into it. Some people would disagree, but me and Dr. Friedberg like to think of pets as family. When you give them a place to live, it’s a forever home and you love them even if they’re problematic.” He paused and chose his words with care. “It’s important to be kind to animals, and part of that means loving your pets unconditionally. Even if they’re a little busted up, or not ideal.”

Bucky let the rat scamper up his bicep to his shoulder, whiskers tickling his neck. He rubbed a single index finger down Algernon’s spine, from head to tail. “But why take in broken animals in the first place?”

Ramirez pondered the question for a long minute. “If Friedberg hadn’t come along and stolen that rat, he would have been humanely euthanized and it wouldn’t matter. But even damaged beyond repair, a life as small as a rat’s has value. Spotty is a mean biter, probably only good as snake food, but he has worth beyond what he can do and who can love him because he is more than the sum of his health and abilities. I don’t know what he is worth, but Friedberg decided he was worth enough to give him a comfortable life in her apartment rather than a quiet death in a lab somewhere.”

Alpha shook his head minutely. “Sentiment,” he muttered.

 

The drugstore maneuver was named after the Roberts and Sons Drugstore Guthman used to live near. It was a small place run by some local family, and it almost never closed. It was open in blizzards, high winds, and riots. One time during winter the roof caved in and the pharmacy closed for about twenty minutes while the pharmacist picked rubble out of his hair, and then he reopened it while workmen came to assess and alleviate the damage. Roberts and Sons’ go-to method of dealing with disaster was to keep acting like everything was normal and wait for the problem to resolve itself. Which was what Guthman and Friedberg intended to do. At that moment they did their work and the Winter Soldiers were safely hidden in the apartment SHIELD did not know Friedberg rented with Ramirez to keep them safe. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best she could do with no warning.

Unsurprisingly, people noticed. Tony Stark stormed into her office demanding to know where the Winter Soldiers had gone, with Bruce Banner on his heels. Stark was annoyed and suspicious (clever man) but Banner seemed more bewildered by Stark’s behavior than the Soldiers’ absence.

“Are they not in their room?” she asked, feigning ignorance.

“You mean you don’t know what happened to them?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what happened to your tone, Mr. Stark.” She could see him mentally kicking himself. Only then did she concede, “The only people with authority to move them would be me and the director. Perhaps you should consult with him.”

She watched them go, her stomach churning. Fury represented another ambiguous piece on the board; he might have asked Sitwell to take the Soldiers out for endurance tests, but she had received no authorization. Her thoughts ran round and round. Suppose Fury were dishonest and wanted the Winter Soldiers for nefarious gains: moving them as she had done would be viewed as mutiny and he had the power to make her life a living hell for as long, or short, as she lived. Fury might even be part of Hydra, which posed a whole new set of issues because she might be able to hide the Soldiers from SHIELD, but she lacked the resources to hide them from Hydra. But suppose Fury were honest: he may still view the drugstore maneuver as mutinous and kill her career, he may be posing a problem to whoever Sitwell worked for and find himself too troublesome to keep alive, he may even do Hydra’s bidding without realizing. There was no version of this that put her on top, no wriggling that could save her from her fate.

Stark and Banner would go to Fury and ask where the Soldiers were, and Fury would act, perhaps revealing his loyalties along the way. Guthman mustn’t put a foot wrong.

 

Some of the rats knew tricks. Algernon could “sit pretty,” roll over, fetch, spin, and shake. Bucky only half listened while Ramirez described the rat as the “Alex of the rodent world” whatever that meant. They set up a miniature obstacle course and watched Algernon go through the paces on quick little rat feet. It hurt to look at.

Bucky remembered an obstacle course very like this one; Hydra would rouse him from cryo and, if time permitted, put him through his paces before the mission to keep him sharp. How many times did he run the course alone? How many times did he run it against a specter, a ghost lurking in the corner of his eye? And how many times did he run it against Alpha, against Steve? The memories jumbled in the fore of his mind, scattered shards of recollection that tore at him from the inside out. He thought that with more memories surfacing he would be able to make sense of the jumble, but the sense he gleaned only hurt more. Tony Stark’s face loomed, blotchy and angry. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. He squeezed his eyes shut and peeled them open again just as Algernon finished the course and scampered to Ramirez’s beckoning hand for a treat in the form of a peanut.

Conditioning, he reflected, using unsalted peanuts instead of electrodes because even if the least of God’s creatures’ lives had worth, then their suffering must be avoided. Algernon seemed to preen under their combined gaze and performed the spin trick unsolicited, then reared onto his haunches to sit pretty and paw the air for another treat. Ramirez chuckled and tickled the rat’s belly, knocking him over. Alpha’s face softened, and not really a smile but the beginnings of one tugged at his mouth. Even a rat’s life had value, and their comfort and health was a priority for people with letters after their names, for people who made decent money at an intelligence agency. Even the least of God’s creatures could be conditioned with little more than treats and affection, but that conditioning was hardly ironclad—Algernon deviated from the script, performing spontaneous tricks in the hope of more peanuts.

Alpha must not remember deviating from Hydra’s dictate—a state of affairs Bucky was only too glad to maintain. But Bucky remembered it, half a lifetime ago, when he was given the kill order for Howard and Maria Stark. He remembered climbing the sheer cliffs a handful of miles from their home estate, knowing that only the Winter Soldier was strong and mad enough to do so. He remembered waiting in a comfortable alcove with an eye pressed to the scope of his rifle, the way the hours passed painfully slow. Surely he must have waited for days, years, eons, with the unbearably blue sky stretched above him and the rage of the wind pulling at his tac gear, passing harmlessly over the outside of his goggles and muzzle a hair’s breadth from the skin of his face, but never touching him, impossibly far away.

_Though an eon passes while he waits in the stone alcove, the sun scarcely moves in that limitless blue sky and he watches his target approach._

_His briefing did not include a photo of either of the Starks, but it did include a detailed picture of their vehicle of choice and its plates, as well as a map of the area they frequented on their Sunday morning outings. The red car is easy to make out, easy to take out, unmarked lead slug and Soviet rifling, tuck the bodies and their intended picnic back in the car, slice the brake lines for good luck, push through a break in the guard rail, scale down the ravine, a spray of gasoline and a spark takes care of the rest, make it to extraction with twenty minutes to spare. He suffers no glimmer of recognition, no sting of guilt or regret, only the glow of a job well done._

_If he expects to be put away after the op, he is surprised when a new dossier is pushed into his hands. “A defector,” one of the many nameless, faceless handlers tells him. “Eliminate him with extreme prejudice. You have seventy-two hours.” Beta opens the dossier and pauses as his eyes fall on a face he would know blind, a face that is as familiar to him as his own. “Is there a problem?”_

_Beta drops his hand from his own cheek and levels a stare at the handler. “No.”_

_“Then proceed, Soldier.”_

_The stray asset is easy to find with the whole of Hydra looking for him; they aim Beta in the correct direction and pull the trigger. The church is empty except for a stiff figure sitting in one of the pews, staring up at the crucifix behind the altar. His blond hair is a little shaggy and in need of a thorough wash. He wears a loose jersey over a black body suit not unlike the one Beta wears: the kind of disguise that would fool civilians (who are soft and just a bit stupid) but would never pass the giggle test for a Hydra agent. But what arrests the Asset’s attention are the defector’s eyes, blue and glassy and sunken and familiar._

_And then the defector turns to look at him and Beta cannot help the scream he looses in the sanctuary. His orders are to eliminate with extreme prejudice, but the target seems to have other ideas. Bullets sink into plaster walls, into wooden pews, into red carpeted floor, the target’s body evading evisceration by mere inches every time. And then the target, incredibly fast, stupidly graceful, slides into Beta’s space._

_And they dance._

_The stakes are high. If Beta fails, he will surely die by the target’s capable hand. If he fails and lives, he will suffer by Hydra’s. He must succeed at all costs because failure means he stands to lose everything and more. But the target moves like a snake, he moves like the Asset himself, and agony spears him when his metal fist lands a glancing blow to the target’s torso._

_And then they run. The target breaks from their tenuous dance and sprints, no, sails, for the nearest stained glass window. The Virgin Mary crumbles with a single well-aimed blow and the target is making his way to freedom with the Asset in hot pursuit. The sun beats down painfully bright through his goggles and his breath hisses in and out of the muzzle. The target pivots without warning and kicks out, barely parrying the knife the Winter Soldier conjures from his sleeve. Beta registers the dry breeze, the sound of traffic, interested onlookers in his peripherals, the impossible sun high overhead, but his attention is riveted on the target._

_The defector takes to a sprint once more but only makes another few yards before Beta engages him again. The resulting scuffle knocks his muzzle to the asphalt and for the first time in living memory wind and sun caresses his skin. The goggles follow next with a clatter, but he digs his metal fingers into the defector’s jersey and it tears and then the Asset and the target are nearly nose to nose, still fighting. The latter liberates a gun from the Asset’s person and he responds in kind by knocking it from his hand and breaking his wrist in the process._

_The target weasels out of Beta’s grip and dances just out of reach, hissing and panting and holding the injured wrist out of harm’s way. “You know me,” he growls._

_“No, I don’t!” Beta screams, and launches himself forward. The target dances out of reach again and seeks higher ground via a fire escape. They run up iron grated steps to the top of that building and, through some twist of luck, the target loses his footing on the roof and goes down hard. He flips himself over just in time for Beta to descend on him in a fury._

_“You know me,” he gasps again, eyes rolling in his head. Beta strikes his face hard and the cheekbone gives with a sickening crunch._

_“You’re my mission,” he snarls, and the Winter Soldier does not know emotions, but if he did he would call the lurch unsettling the shadow of his soul betrayal. “You’re my mission!” he screams and lands another blow across the defector’s face. He isn’t even struggling anymore; his body, still taut with adrenaline, shaking with it, lay nearly still and acquiescing under Beta’s. One eye is already swollen shut, but the other stares up, terribly blue and bright and everything is Wrong, so wrong Beta feels his stomach give an uncomfortable heave. His fist tightens around one of the many straps in the defector’s tactical gear and he drags the un-struggling body to the edge of the building._

_His mission does not fight, does not plead or sob like so many targets before him. He stares up at Beta with something that isn’t quite sadness and isn’t quite surrender. “Then finish it,” he breathes. Blood speckles his teeth, leaves spots on his lips. Beta makes to throw him down on the unyielding street below, but his body does not seem to be taking orders from his brain. He stands there, poised on the precipice, and understanding slides into place, because the quiet tremulous part of his brain that Hydra could not burn, slice or electrocute into compliance has made a decision without the rest of his mind’s consent, and it decided the target would be the only one to survive an encounter with the Winter Soldier. Let Hydra eliminate them both and come what may._

_That is how Hydra finds them: Beta still poised over Alpha’s living body, murder perpetually frozen in mid-act, but the killing blow never falls. When asked to account for his actions, Beta simply sits in the Chair, eyes glassy, mouth a tight line. “But I knew him,” he says softly, the picture of a broken toy soldier._

_Von Strucker watches the tape over and over. “Wipe them and put them away,” he commands at last._

_“Sir?”_

_“They will be more useable together than apart,” he decrees. “So wipe them and put them away and from now on, put them on mission together. If all else fails, we can wipe them and start over, or eliminate them at our leisure.”_

While not ironclad, Hydra conditioning would be a bitch to extinguish were the Winter Soldiers so inclined. “Excuse me,” Alpha murmured, and made his way to the restroom through the kitchen. He had the entire ground floor of the townhouse committed to memory from a single walkthrough. It was the work of a moment to locate Friedberg’s single landline on the kitchen counter, lift the phone from its cradle and dial one of the many phone numbers Hydra instilled into his mind for just such an occasion. He did not speak into the receiver, but propped the phone beside its cradle and continued through the house to the restroom where he shut the door just a little noisier than necessary.

Guessing at what the other Soldier had done, Bucky stroked Algernon’s soft fur one more time and then placed him gently back into the cage. “Bored already?” Ramirez asked.

Bucky’s chest ached to look at him, because Ramirez would not survive an encounter with Hydra’s extraction team. Alpha rejoined them, eyes haunted, but the psychologist did not seem to notice. “You should go out the back,” Bucky told him, voice pitched low.

Ramirez’s face fell. “What did you two do?”

“Ramirez, _please_ ,” Alpha hissed.

“No! You can’t do this! They’re already coming, aren’t they!”

Too late, he turned toward the front door just as it was kicked open. Alpha grabbed him by the collar and forced him to his knees as an entire Hydra Strike team, dressed in SHIELD riot gear, stormed into the townhouse, Rumlow at the front. A shrewd bastard, he looked from the Winter Soldiers’ blank expressions to Ramirez’s unmitigated horror and back again before he took a pistol from his belt and passed it to Alpha. “This one’s seen too much. You know what to do, Soldier.”

Alpha’s foot knocked the breath out of Ramirez when it slammed him face down into the carpet. “Cap!” he wheezed, squirming, desperate. The foot pressed between his shoulder blades pressed down even harder to hold him still, and Ramirez’s last thought was that he never really appreciated how deadly Rogers was. Agony arced through his shoulder as a lead slug tore through flesh and bone. Hot blood pooled on the floor. There was another shot, and another, another, and Ramirez went still and silent.

The Strike team visibly relaxed when Alpha passed the gun back to Rumlow, butt first. “Atta boy,” he half laughed, half sighed. “Move out.”

The Winter Soldiers marched back into the street and into the unmarked white vans waiting for them, back into Hydra’s welcoming arms. Alpha seated himself next to Bucky, no, Beta, and let their knees press together. He could not want, he did not know how, but if he could he would want Bucky to be far away from this van, preferably someplace warm with plenty of natural light. He let the back of his hand brush the back of Beta’s wrist, a motion so minute none of the team noticed. If he could feel, he would call the turmoil in his chest regret. He was obedient his entire life, a life contained in fractures of moments in memory, and actions along the axis of two weeks, but if he were to err he would err for the man beside him, for the person he would become given half a chance. But Alpha could not want, and he could not feel, and he could not disobey, because those were the things people do. He was not a man, and certainly not a good man, but he could be a perfect soldier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally planned to kill off Algernon, but this is much, much worse. Feel free to leave me hate mail in the comments.
> 
> The things Bucky hates remembering at the beginning of the chapter include assassinating Howard and Maria Stark and trying to assassinate Steve/Alpha. 
> 
> The drugstore maneuver can just as easily be renamed the waffle house maneuver, for the same reasons. 
> 
> The title for this chapter is a shameless bastardization of one of my favorite lines from Captain America: the First Avenger. "...stay who you are, not a perfect soldier, but a good man."
> 
> Also, I do not work for Satan's publisher so this will not be the last chapter. There is more story to come and, dare I say it, there may even be a happy ending. Maybe.


	7. And the Monster was Made Flesh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Ah,” he breathed. It was more an exhale than an utterance, completely undetectable to someone without enhanced hearing, but it was a sound with inflections. It was a sound that carried the weight of gross resignation with it—not the resignation of doing what he was told but the resignation of going squarely against orders even though he would really rather not. It was the sound of a man resigning himself to a lifelong war against the entire world because he could never come home again.
> 
> And then the warehouse exploded.

Sitwell never returned to Guthman’s office for the access codes, presumably because he didn’t need to. While Sitwell completely failed to return to Guthman, Stark and Banner invaded Fury’s office, much to the director’s chagrin.

“What did you do with them?” Stark demanded, eyes wild, face splotchy.

He raised a single eyebrow. “What did I do with whom?”

Banner elbowed past Stark. “The Winter Soldiers are not in their cell, Director, and Dr. Guthman doesn’t know where they are. And that leaves you.” A vein had begun to show along his forehead, but it hadn’t turned green yet, which was a good sign.

“Fury, I swear to God if you sent them on a mission somewhere—“

“Excuse me, but who was it that stormed into their cell this morning pissing and moaning about how they killed his parents?” Fury snapped.

Stark shut his mouth, but that wasn’t going to last long. “Excuse the _fuck_ outta you,” he blustered. “And just because I wanted to give them a piece of my mind doesn’t mean I want SHIELD to become their new Hydra you pirate-looking—“

“Director!” Banner cut in, voice tense. “I think what Tony means to say is that Natasha found some pretty damning evidence that SHIELD might be at least partially infiltrated by Hydra, which means we need to locate the Winter Soldiers right now.”

Fury got to his feet. “First of all, that’s ridiculous. Hydra is not in SHIELD, period. Second, why am I only now hearing about Agent Romanoff’s alleged discovery? Third, get the fuck out of my office.” He frog marched the two scientists out into the hall and shut the door in their faces before turning back into office. Hydra infiltrating SHIELD was not only possible, but at this stage of the game, probable. And if he were a Hydra agent, what would he want to know?

He sat down at his computer terminal and let his fingers fly across the keys. “ _Access denied_ ,” the computer chirped. “Override,” he told it, and fed the system his credentials and the necessary password. “ _Access denied_ ,” it chirped again. That was not good. Very not good. He drummed his fingers against his desk for a moment. Someone fooled with his access codes, the highest access codes SHIELD had to offer, which meant there was either a double agent or he had been directoring in his sleep. And the double agent, provided there was only one, was a real son of a bitch with enough cunning and guile to worm his or her way through the ranks and make it into the World Security Council or somewhere else just as important. And the real horror was that someone like that would be close to him, if not physically, then socially; Project Insight, even in its infancy, was not safe and Nick himself was in mortal peril even now.

 He sent out a triple encrypted message to Agent Hill that read: **Return to NYC immediately. Deep shadow conditions.** He washed his face in his private bathroom and braced himself for the shit storm that was sure to come.

 

The sound of marching boots disappeared and after a long moment Ramirez crawled through his own blood and into the kitchen. He yanked the phone line out of the wall with a wheeze and pulled his cellphone from his hip pocket. His shoulder felt like it was on fire and his ear rang, but most of the shots Alpha fired landed into the floor. Not that Hydra noticed; his shoulder made such a nasty spray of red that the apartment living room looked like a Tarantino death scene. Which was the point. Light headed and dizzy he might be, but Ramirez knew a gift when it was handed to him.

“Become a psychologist, they said,” he sneered to himself while he painstakingly punched in 911. “It’s indoor work. Air conditioned. It’ll be fun, they said.” His phone dialed, and he listened to the slow motion dial tone, a hand pressed to the gushing wound on his shoulder. “It’ll be away from the violence and the gunfire, they said.”

“911, what is your emergency?”

“Hey there. I’m having a terrible day; let me tell you how it makes me feel!” he cackled, and rattled off the address and the nature of his injury before his vision faded to black.

 

The ride to the Hydra base took an eternity and no time at all. The Strike team marched the Winter Soldiers to where it all began, a dumpy little warehouse with subpar lighting, two cryo tanks and two Chairs. Pierce looked down at them from his place on a catwalk that ran along the wall. “This has been quite the fiasco.” He walked with a predator’s smooth gait and took his time strolling down the grated stairs. He paused before them, hands in his pockets and looked at them each in turn for a long moment. “I can’t say that I’m angry. Just disappointed.” The words stung, but the Soldiers knew better than to let him know that.

“Sir, how do we proceed?” one of the technicians asked. It did not escape Alpha’s notice that none of the technicians wanted to be near the Assets. Even the Strike team betrayed their trepidation, subconsciously leaning a little away, as if the Soldiers stank. Pierce alone seemed unfazed, completely at ease in their presence. The mutinous part of Alpha’s brain clenched and coiled tighter still. _A fool,_ it purred.

“Don’t bother with correction, we’re just going to wipe them anyway. And then I want Beta put on ice, and Alpha deployed to Sokovia.”

“Deployed on his own, sir?”

“Is there an echo in here? Yes, deployed alone.”

“Commander,” Alpha rasped. The room fell dead silent, all activity came to a screeching halt. The Winter Soldier does not express preferences, and he does not talk out of turn, but something older than the Soldier pushed Alpha to speak against the Wrongness threatening to swallow him whole. He wet his lips, mouth suddenly cotton dry. “The Winter Soldiers are more useable together than apart, sir,” he explained.

Pierce smirked, amused. “Your work has been a gift to mankind. The world is at the tipping point between order and chaos, and you are going to give it the push it needs.”

“We are more powerful together. Sir.”

The smirk slipped off Pierce’s face. Alpha did not pull away when he backhanded him, but he did allow his head to move with the blow, saving the commander from hurting himself. Still, the blow stung and for some reason that annoyed Alpha. His tongue explored the new split in his lip. “Ah,” he breathed. It was more an exhale than an utterance, completely undetectable to someone without enhanced hearing, but it was a sound with inflections. It was a sound that carried the weight of gross resignation with it—not the resignation of doing what he was told but the resignation of going squarely against orders even though he would really rather not. It was the sound of a man realizing he was going to have to climb over veritable mountains of corpses just to fall into a trap of a different nature. It was the sound of a man resigning himself to a lifelong war against the entire world because he could never come home again. And he might as well start with Pierce.

He did not struggle very hard, which probably saved his life as Alpha yanked him to stand between him and the nervous technicians and increasingly itchy Strike team, one hand wrapped tight around his throat.

“What!?” Pierce hissed, squirming.

Alpha regarded the rest of the room dispassionately. “Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?”

And then the warehouse exploded. As a shield, Pierce’s body only provided social value; he was too awkward to toss with any accuracy and Alpha suspected a point blank shot would lance through him like a hot knife through butter, but none of his men seemed inclined to fire on or through him. Sentiment, he thought, lips curling as a hail of gunfire pelted the floor where Bucky had been standing not three seconds ago. Alpha briefly debated throwing Pierce bodily into the fray, but he knew that would not create the proverbial splash he was looking for. He let Bucky take the offensive: in seconds he had a gun, lifted from a Strike team member who had been just a hair too slow on the uptake, and was mowing down agents from the shadow of a cryo tank. Bullets pinged off the tank's metal shell, but those shots became fewer and further between.

Technicians not caught in firing range huddled, white-faced and shaking, along one wall. A pair of Strike team members stood out of range of Bucky’s aim from his vantage point behind the tank. “Drop your weapons,” Alpha  barked. For emphasis he gave Pierce an unfriendly squeeze and the commander gurgled unhappily in his grip. He still struggled, but years sitting behind a desk did not prepare him to be on the receiving end of the Winter Soldiers’ wrath. He wriggled and tried to fit a hand into his breast pocket, but Alpha wrapped the hand not clasping his throat around the offending wrist and wrenched it hard. The bones crunched.

“Drop your weapons!” Alpha yelled over Pierce’s howling. Two rifles, a pair of handguns and at least three hunting knives hit the floor.

“You can’t do this,” Pierce gabbled. He sucked in great whooping breaths and the symptoms of shock were already setting in. “We made you,” he continued, eyes glassy.

Bucky waited for orders in the shadow of the cryo tank. The technicians sniffled and waited for the end. Pierce watched the ceiling, perspiration gleaming on his brow. This, he realized, was Hydra. Pierce provided the driving force, the shadowed soul of the operation. He commanded, he directed, he deflected, he kept Hydra going in every major city of the world, but he was just a man—flesh and blood and bones that give with only a little force.

Bucky straightened to his full height and pointed his gun at a shadow creeping into Alpha’s periphery. “Freeze,” he growled, and Rumlow froze.

“That handgun only holds eight rounds,” Rumlow said. “I count eight of my buddies’ bodies on the floor.”

“Don’t need a bullet to crush a windpipe,” Bucky countered, face blank. “Drop your weapons.”

Alpha could feel Pierce’s heart beat under his skin. He thought of a spotted rat with a distinct scar along its head, and how its life had value, and how it might have died quietly in a lab somewhere and the universe would go on, unperturbed.

Rumlow did not drop his weapons. He stood, taut, poised, mouth a tight line. “Look, it’s nothing personal—“

He probably meant it to be very dramatic, pulling the trigger on the last syllable but Alpha was faster and his inclination to tolerate drama had been one of the first things Hydra stripped from him. Pierce carried a serviceable hand gun in his jacket, light and tiny in Alpha’s hand, but loaded and accurate. Rumlow’s shot embedded itself into the wall some feet shy of Alpha’s head and he crumpled with a scream, hands going to the gush of blood spouting from his knee. The other two Strike team members received a similar treatment, Alpha’s hand still wrapped around Pierce’s throat.

And then he started moving. Piece struggled, eyes rolling frantically in his head. “What are you doing?” Bucky asked, brow furrowed.  He lifted one of the dropped Strike team guns and kept a watchful eye on the techs, all of whom seemed perfectly content with their kneecaps as is, and willing to comply if it meant keeping them that way.

“I don’t think I’m a weapon anymore,” Alpha sighed, and half threw, half shoved Pierce into one of the Chairs. The straps closed over his arms and legs automatically and he started screaming and thrashing. Alpha pushed the rubber mouth guard into his gaping maw and was pleased to find the noise muffled somewhat. “Weapons are not cruel,” he concluded, eyeing the dials on the machine for a moment before flipping a few choice switches. Tears rolled down Pierce’s waxy face. His chest heaved up and down and Alpha could smell the terror on him. The Chair’s arm moved smoothly into place over his head and clamped down.

“Rumlow and his friends may never walk again, but they will live.” Bucky reasoned. “And this one will not remember, but he will live. They will not hurt another person again. That’s not cruel.”

“No,” Alpha agreed, face solemn. Pierce’s screams redoubled when the Chair came on line, and his entire body shuddered as voltage meant to wipe a super soldier's memories came into contact with his cranium. Alpha watched, dispassionate. “It is cruel that it gives me… satisfaction.”

“In that case, neither of us are weapons,” Bucky replied.

 

Fury had not been amused by Stark’s antics before, but he started to consider sending the man a fruit basket when JARVIS sent a warning straight to his phone. The AI was a damn security risk, a disaster waiting to happen, but it probably saved his life. He punched the gas pedal and outmaneuvered a knot of racing “police” cars before they could box him in. Hill tried to talk him out of installing a machine gun in the console, and he had never been so glad he had ignored her. “No, Maria. It’s not gratuitous,” he muttered to himself.  Another “police” car rammed into him from behind and a second one pinned his car to a cement median. Breathless, single eye wide, he waited for the perfect moment and then opened fire.

Too little too late, he realized as more vehicles surrounded him. In the end he cut his way out of his car and went underground, quite literally. No one followed him; he did not yet know whether that was a good thing or not, but he was not about to think about it too hard. He ran to the first place that came to mind that would be safe from Hydra insurgents.

 

Keiko Matsuo planned on being a world-famous journalist, which was why she quit her job at a rinky-dink newspaper in Fresno and travelled across the United States to Washington D.C. She was currently interning for a local news station, wondering how long she needed to chase her dream before she caught up with it, and carrying out her mother’s stern dictate to visit Aunt Peggy.

Aunt Peggy had worked with Keiko’s grandfather during World War II and, having no one to take care of her from the Morita clan in D.C. made Mrs. Matsuo (maiden name of Morita, thank you very much) a fussy customer. “Yes, Mama,” Keiko sighed into her cell, the slim plastic tucked between cheek and shoulder. “Yes, I’m there right now.” She elbowed her way through the door and waggled her fingers at the receptionist. The foyer smelled of rubber tubing, oxygen tanks, cotton and floor polish—like a hospital, but not. It was a nice little living facility; SHIELD footed the bill to keep Aunt Peggy happy and healthy here, and the children and grandchildren of the Howling Commandoes each made at least one pilgrimage to meet her. Now that she lived in D.C. Keiko found herself visiting Peggy on weekends and sometimes her lunch breaks because the facility was blissfully air conditioned, quiet, and the old bird told the best war stories.

“Not better than your grandfather’s,” Mrs. Matsuo countered.

Keiko rolled her eyes. “I don’t speak ill of the dead, but if I did I would tell the God’s honest truth that Grandpa didn’t tell war stories; he told you the facts, and also whatever Dum Dum said about them. Aunt Peggy tells _stories_ , Mama.”

Mrs. Matsuo huffed nearly half a world away. “I’ll let you go, then. Call me when you get home.”

Keiko heaved a sigh like the request was an actual imposition, but she smiled while she did it. “I will. It’s not like it’s especially dangerous in D.C., though.”

“I still worry.”

“I know. I’ll call you when I get in. Love you, bye.”

She disconnected as she walked into the apartment/hospice room, and stopped dead. Two men in inoffensive blue scrubs were there already there, one in a chair beside the bed and the other leaning against the wall, still as stone. They weren’t nurses; their eyes were cold and sunken and haunted, their faces gaunt, jaws caught between stubbled and bearded. They both wore baseball caps on their head and combat boots, and the whole ensemble might have been comical except they were huge dudes with scary written all over them in big block letters and they had yet to take their eyes off her.

“Oh, Keiko!” Aunt Peggy rasped with a flourish of her hand. “Do meet a pair of old flames from my youth: Captain Steven Grant Rogers and Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. Boys, this is Morita’s granddaughter, Keiko Matsuo.”

Keiko really, really wished Aunt Peggy, bless her heart, had not just given her full name to these probably serial killers. Heart in her throat, she swaggered into the room and casually, slowly, slid a sweaty hand back into her pocket to clasp her phone. “Ma’am, these are not people from your youth,” she said tightly.

But her words were drowned out by the blond man’s exclamation. “Jim Morita’s granddaughter? Our Morita?”

“I don’t believe it either,” the long haired man sniffed.

“Believe it,” Peggy told them.

Keiko felt herself losing control of the situation. She needed to get Peggy out of this room and away from these weirdos ASAP. The combined, unmitigated wrath of SHIELD would be nothing compared to her mother’s if Peggy came to harm.

“Too pretty to be Jim’s blood,” the long haired one said.

“I… _excuse_ me?” Keiko spluttered in spite of herself.

“Too eloquent,” the other agreed.

“Boys,” Peggy chided. “I’ll not hear you speak of him like that.” She heaved a sigh and frowned at the hulking, poorly dressed men, who at least had the decency to look chastised. “No need to be giving the Morita family line trouble. It was a miracle he married anyone to procreate with at all.”

The men made ungainly snorting noises, like sinners trying not to guffaw in church, and Peggy looked exceedingly pleased with herself. “Aunt Peggy!” Keiko snapped. Three sets of eyes turned to look at her. She sucked in a breath. “I think your…guests should be on their way. You need to rest.”

And then the men looked actually contrite and sent Peggy imploring looks, and the whole thing might have been endearing except that Aunt Peggy thought they were actually Captain America and Bucky Barnes, and they were taking advantage of that to some manipulative end. “Oh, it is certainly time to go, but I shall be going with them.”

“Whut?” Keiko gasped.

“What?” the men gasped.

“Absolutely not,” the blond one said; he had steel in his voice and he stood up a little straighter and prior experience told Keiko that this was going to be a very short argument.

Because Rule #1 of dealing with Peggy Carter is that Peggy Carter Does What She Wants. “I’m going, Steve, and that is final. Now help me pack my things.”

He squinted. “You can’t give me orders.”

“The hell I can’t! I outrank you!” 

And that was how Keiko found herself getting shuffled into a midgrade Sedan with Aunt Peggy, her walker, a foldup wheelchair, a shoebox of various medications and two burly kidnappers. Though, to be fair, the men seemed to have the same bewildered look on their faces that she did, and Keiko suspected they all shared the same thought: _How did this happen to me?_

Peggy took shotgun, pleased as punch and smugness rolled off her in waves. The blond one, Steve (probably not his real name) drove them and his friend Bucky (super not a real name, anyway) lounged beside Keiko. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” he told her quietly while Steve and Peggy bickered over radio stations.

She glared at him. “I don’t trust you. I don’t like you. I know you’re taking advantage of an older woman who is important to me and my family. If you want me gone you’re going to have to kill me—just make sure you get it right the first time because I will not give you time to reload. Get me?”

Not-Bucky blinked. “Maybe you are Jim’s grandkid after all.”

 

Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were dead. They died a long time ago, during the second World War. Keiko knew these things to be true, but the way the men and Peggy talked was almost enough to make her wonder.

“And you said ‘Mind the gap!’” Not-Bucky said.

“I did not!” Not-Steve replied. “That was Monty.”

“No,” he argued, but half-heartedly.

Not-Steve flicked on his turn signal a split second before weaving through three lanes of traffic. “It was Monty,” he confirmed, like he hadn’t just nearly driven two different cars off the road. Keiko grabbed the oh shit bar when they left the parking lot and had yet to let it go. Her knuckles turned white. No one else in the car seemed the least bit concerned that their driver wove through traffic like a homicidal maniac.

“Sounds like Monty,” Peggy murmured, half asleep. “Do you remember when we first met?” Peggy asked abruptly after a moment of silence. And on and on like that, going over stories familiar to Keiko except told through the eyes of Captain America and Bucky Barnes instead of Jim Morita or Peggy Carter, and the men seemed to know the kind of details that would never be printed in biographies, or mentioned in documentaries, but had been known well to the Commandos. Dum Dum snored, Dernier collected and gave away tiny glass figurines whenever he could, Gabe Jones and Barnes would periodically squabble over reading material (or “reading material”) and the Captain himself cheated at poker.

“Like a motherfucker,” Not-Bucky tacked on.

“I did not cheat,” Not-Steve countered. He sounded so outraged she almost believed him, but he laughed through what he said next. “I _never_ cheated.”

“And he lies like a rug,” Peggy contributed. Keiko could hear the smile in her voice and she fervently hoped that, against all logic and reason, that these two were the genuine articles because anything else would crush the old woman. Peggy loved Steve and Bucky; Keiko grew up hearing the detached ache in her grandfather’s voice when he spoke of them, and meeting Peggy only served to solidify the tragedy. Those boys had been loved. Years later historians tried to paint the story of Captain America and Bucky Barnes as brothers who had gone to war and died for their country and that was it, but no one mentioned the ones they left behind, or if they did it was all about the romance between Peggy and Steve. Those shallow histories always smacked of cheapness to Keiko, but the very thought of them after seeing Peggy and “her boys” put a sour taste in her mouth. Because Peggy loved (loves?) Steve and Bucky deeply, irrationally, unconditionally. She might have wanted to marry Steve after the war, but the affection in her voice now betrayed something even deeper than a romantic connection. Maybe Not-Steve was a good actor, but she heard the same thing when he spoke to Peggy; under everything he said, every time he smiled, Keiko could hear the undercurrent of _I’m so glad you’re here with me._

After a while they ran out of things to reminisce about and they all fell silent. Not-Bucky slouched in his seat, cap pulled low over his face, arms crossed, either sleeping or doing a good job of feigning sleep. Keiko leaned back and followed his example.

The car thrummed down the highway. “I’m lost, Peggy.” Keiko risked cracking one eye open and peered through her lashes in time to see Peggy rest her thin, frail hand on Not-Steve’s knee. Keiko shut her eye and listened even harder. Not-Steve blew out a breath. “Me and Buck are in real trouble. Hydra will come for us and they won’t pull any punches. And SHIELD will come for us; I don’t exactly look forward to any clemency on Fury’s end, either.”

“Are those your only choices?” she asked, voice pitched low to keep from disturbing the passengers in the back. “Flee Hydra or flee SHIELD?”

Not-Steve sighed and rubbed a hand across his face. “If we don’t run, we’ll just become Assets for one or the other, and we’re back to where we started. I’m not a weapon anymore. I don’t know if I can be one ever again.”

Peggy chewed that over for a long time. “If you’re not a weapon, what does that make you?”

“A monster,” he said without hesitation, like it was the natural response.

“I’m not going to argue with you, because you’ve already made up your mind.” She patted his knee. “But I think you’re capable of so much more than you realize, no matter what you’ve been made to do in the past. And I think you have more options than you know. Show me the strategist that singlehandedly pushed Colonel Phillips into early retirement.”

Not-Steve drummed his fingers along the steering wheel for a long moment, one eye on the road, the other on the middle distance. “Doctor Banner called us Avengers when we spoke to him last.” He chewed his lip. “Hydra has infiltrated the SHIELD you worked so hard to create, and if we are ever to be free of both SHIELD and Hydra, we need to earn the title of Avenger and finish what we started in Italy.”

Peggy grinned. “And I know just where to start.”

 

In an older apartment complex in Washington D.C. a woman who was not a nurse balanced a basket of laundry on her hip and tucked her phone between her shoulder and ear. She listened for a long moment, he brow furrowed. “What do you mean my aunt was kidnapped?” she asked, voice cold. “Never mind; I’ll deal with it.” She turned to her two battered guests. “The Winter Soldiers have Aunt Peggy,” Sharon Carter told them.

“Is there any way to know where they’re going?” Sam asked.

Natasha worried the edge of one of her bandages. “If they have Carter, no one is safe. And assuming Nick isn’t Hydra, he’ll want to go dark; we need to find him before they do.”

“And then?” Sam prodded, gut uneasy.

“And then we take them out. They’re erratic and compromised,” she continued before Sam could interject. “There was no telling what side they were actually on before, but the fact that the first thing they do is kidnap Peggy Carter is a pretty good indicator. They need to be eliminated before Hydra can put them back in stasis and hide them again.”

“You sound like you do this a lot.”

Natasha shrugged. “More than I like. They’re not the kind you save. I wish it weren’t true, but it is.”

 

“Agent Sitwell? Did you still need those access codes?”

Sitwell let himself into Guthman’s hurricane-wrecked office and spared her a friendly smile. “Good afternoon, Doctor. I trust you are well?”

“As well as I can be in the circumstances.”

“Oh?”

“An esteemed coworker of mine was rushed into the emergency room yesterday.” She watched him and he watched her.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Is he alright?”

She did not blink. She did not move. “I never said whether that coworker was male or not.”

Sitwell’s smile tightened. He turned and made sure the office door was closed securely, flipped the lock to shut out the rest of the world. He turned back and looked down at the handle of plastic clutched in her hand. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he told her, voice soft.

“But you’re capable of overcoming your personal distaste for the suffering of others, aren’t you, Jasper. You won’t let a little blood get between you and what you want.”

“Now that you mention it.” He slapped the Taser out of her grip and slammed her onto her desk, pressing her face into her paperwork and driving the breath out of her. “You’re going to tell me what I need to know. Do not make me get my sleeves dirty, Doctor Guthman.” He lowered himself so that he could speak into her ear. “You’re going to tell me where the Winter Soldiers are headed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone wondered if we would get to see Peggy Carter or one of the Commandos/Commados' progeny. Wish granted!
> 
> My head cannon is that the Commandos talked crap about each other nonstop. The joke with Morita, in my brain, is that he's derpy (with a goofy mug and an ineloquent disposition). Obviously, he's not portrayed as especially derpy, which would make the trash talk extra ridiculous. 
> 
> Keiko is named after Morita's mother. You can learn more about Morita below: http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Jim_Morita 
> 
> The whole reason I wrote this story was because I got this idea that there could have been two Winter Soldiers, and, in a flight of fancy, I wondered what would have happened if Hydra tried to separate them, given Steve's track record with separation anxiety. Originally, I planned to have them raze the whole warehouse to the ground, but I decided to show some restraint. This time.


	8. Director Fury's Cabin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha had seen empires rise and fall—a few of them by her deliberate machinations. None of them compared to the turmoil plain on Fury’s face, or to the way his shoulders slumped and all the fight went out of him. Because Stark was right; SHIELD was compromised and, as such, it was a terrorist organization with highly trained operatives and breathtaking fire power. 
> 
> “Well can we at least rescue Aunt Peggy before you all destroy my career?” Sharon sighed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's suffering time!

Fury wished he could say that he orchestrated the rendezvous, but technically Stark was responsible, thanks in large part to JARVIS. Fury, Stark and Banner sat in a booth in a Denny’s, drinking late night coffee and pretending not to notice that their server had seated them at the one sticky table in the entire establishment. “Hydra picked them up from some townhouse full of rats,” Banner told him. “The place was wrecked. A lot of blood, but no bodies.”

“From there I was able to track them to a warehouse,” Stark said into his coffee. “Even more blood there. And a few bodies. The survivors were locked in the basement. They were pretty chatty, all things considered. Apparently Rocky and Bullwinkle went berserk, had some kind of showdown with one of the Strike team, and electrified the ever loving shit out of their fearless leader.”

“Pierce,” Fury said, his face twisting around the name like it tasted unpleasant in his mouth.

“Right-a-mundo,” Stark grunted. “He’s still alive, but they might as well have lobotomized him.”

“Good thing they got to him before I did, then,” Fury growled. He was not in the habit of suffering fools gladly, and traitorous fools could find themselves in some very hot water. Especially traitorous fools who made him think they were friends.

Banner and Stark exchanged a look before the latter said “Hey, why don’t we leave the avenging to the Avengers, ‘kay?”  

Natasha, Sharon Carter and some guy shambled in not long after their server topped off their coffees and water (for Banner). “Who’s this?” Stark demanded.

“Sam Wilson, Para rescue. Well, I was. And you’re Tony Fucking Stark.”

“In the flesh,” he sniggered.

“He’s trustworthy,” Natasha said in response to Fury’s quizzical scowl. “And, more to the point, he’s not SHIELD or Hydra.”

“Which begs the question,” Stark interjected because it was impossible for a conversation to exclude him for any amount of time, “Who is your other lovely friend?”

“Stark, meet Agent Sharon Carter, grand-niece of Director Carter,” Fury said. Sharon inclined her head, a small, confident smile tugging at her mouth, and she sat down in the booth beside Natasha. Together, they made the idyllic picture of a pair of femme fatales on the run, all muted colors, urban camouflage and soft hair pinned back for fight readiness. Stark’s eyes raked her up and down, from her hastily curled locks to the smudged mascara about her eyes, to the peek of scrubs under her black jacket.

“But not exactly above reproach.”

One perfect eyebrow inched upward. “Excuse me?”

She exuded confidence and an air of wildness, like violence suspended in repose, a hurricane spun from colored glass, but the original Carter played a rather prominent part in his early upbringing and Sharon, for her calm demeanor and the ferocity implied in three syllables, had probably never brained someone with a fax machine before. Stark winked at her. “You end up finding some real interesting things when you snoop through Top Secret files. SHIELD is rotted to the core and any agent working for it is suspect, as far as I’m concerned. Nick himself is only here because JARVIS likes him and he feels some kind of obligation towards Director Carter. Nick does, not JARVIS.”

Sharon bristled. “And you don’t think she might be important to me, too?”

“No one said that,” Banner murmured into his water glass.

“But you work for SHIELD,” Stark repeated. “And I don’t feel especially safe working with the spies I already know, thank you very much.”

“It pains me to say it, but he has a point.”

Sharon turned in slow motion to stare at Fury, aghast. “You’re joking.”

“I wish I was, but we need a pair of eyes on the inside. Agent Carter, I’m asking you to crawl back into the belly of the beast.”

“And what are we going to do?” Natasha asked, because she could see an almighty fit brewing behind Sharon’s poker face and she suspected the whole ordeal was going to be annoying and boring.

“We’re going to capture the Winter Soldiers, save Director Carter, destroy Hydra and maybe, just maybe, salvage whatever we can of SHIELD.”

“No.”

All eyes turned to Banner. He did not squirm under their scrutiny, but he kept his eyes trained on the tacky table. One index finger drew designs in a spill of white sugar grains while he spoke next. “For Hydra to go, SHIELD has to go. It’s rotted all the way through; if we’re getting rid of the apples we might as well throw out the barrel.”

“Seconded,” Stark added. “We’re going to get rid of Hydra, either way, and I’ll sleep better at night knowing a few scattered cells can’t hijack SHIELD ops without anyone even noticing.”

Fury sucked in a breath. “If you think I’m just going to stand by and—“

“Look, it’s happening. You can either fight me or get out of my way, but it doesn’t look good on your end, Nick." Stark leaned forward and dropped his voice. "Believe it or not, I know what it’s like to put your blood, sweat and tears into an organization only to find out it wasn’t what you thought it was. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. And I know what it’s like to see some questionable stuff go on under your nose and explain it away as necessary measures for peace. I get it. But the denial ends here. As long as Hydra lives, SHIELD is a terrorist organization and, as the Ten Rings can tell you firsthand, I am deathly allergic to terrorist organizations.”

Natasha had seen empires rise and fall—a few of them by her deliberate machinations. None of them compared to the turmoil plain on Fury’s face, or to the way his shoulders slumped and all the fight went out of him. Because Stark was right; SHIELD was compromised and, as such, it was a terrorist organization with highly trained operatives and breathtaking fire power.

“Well can we at least rescue Aunt Peggy before you all destroy my career?” Sharon sighed.

Fury nodded. “I have a place not far from here. Top secret, known to only the most trusted in my inner circle, and completely safe from unwelcome visitors. We can stock up, rest, and plan without worrying about Hydra.”

 

The woods became forest and the dirt road turned into a woodsy path with trees stretching thick enough overhead to shield them from the moon's wan light, casting them in inky darkness. It was called a cow path, Natasha thought to herself, though she could not pinpoint a time in her life when she would have called it that, could not so much as fathom a use for that turn of phrase in her sprawling vocabulary. After a time, Fury needed to pull over and park the car in the sparse grass and undergrowth. Sharon insisted on coming with them; Natasha filed that information away to analyze at a later date, because the woman must be made out of tougher materials than she thought. Especially since Stark started complaining the minute they stepped into the darkened forest and made their way on foot for Fury’s cabin and Sharon had yet to bow out.

“I just think that if you didn’t insist on a pretense of mystery, I could have gotten us better vehicles and we wouldn’t have to hoof it in the god forsaken jungle.” He slapped at his neck and whined when his hand came away with a crushed mosquito. “This is awful.”

“Were you or were you not held captive for months on end in an Afghanistan cave?” Fury snapped.

“There weren’t as many bugs in the goddam desert. I think I stepped in something.”

Electricity crackled mutely in the distance. Natasha could feel it, an invisible presence that made her hair stand on end, that brought the taste of tin across her tongue. “Not much farther now,” she promised.

Sharon sidled up to her and asked, voice pitched low, “Is Stark always like that?”

“Pretty much,” Banner murmured on her other side, unflappable as always.

“No one will believe me,” Sam said with wide eyes.

“Hold,” Fury barked. Everyone stopped on command, including Stark, though that might have been because Natasha grabbed his collar to keep him from blundering into the energy fence. Fury moved to a control box set against one of the many trees and entered some access codes. All at once a net of blue, semi-transparent energy came into view and, just as quickly, dissolved into nothingness. The thrum of it that settled into Natasha’s chest without her noticing disappeared as well, leaving behind a sensation like wading through a cold spring in an otherwise warm pool. She took a deep breath and they marched across the place where the field and certain death had been just moments ago. In their wake, set on some kind of timer, the field started back up with its inaudible thrum and crackle. Sam and Stark and Banner all looked over their shoulders at it, like it would do some kind of amusing trick.

“This place is impregnable?” she asked in an undertone, quickening her pace to keep up with Fury.

“It is.”

“So no one can get in without your say so? We’re alone?”

He slowed his pace and cast her a sidelong glance. “Yes.”

She pointed into the bracken. “So what’s that?”

He squinted through the gloom to the sizeable hump of what he had mistaken for fallen weeds and branches but now realized was a Sedan parked amidst the trees, hidden under enough flora he might have missed it even in plain daylight. He reached for his gun. “Stay alert,” he told their party, voice only just loud enough for them to hear him and no louder. “We might have company.”

The “cabin” could just as easily been called a bungalow, or a ranch. It was big enough to easily fit them, and painted in greens and browns and blacks to seamlessly blend into the surrounding landscape, making it hard to find if you didn’t know where to look. The front door was left open with the screen door behind it to keep out the bugs and they could hear the sounds of arguing inside. No, the sounds of bickering, Natasha realized. Vanya was the cause of it; she would know that voice anywhere.

“You can’t just talk across the table when it’s convenient for you!” Bucky, her Vanya, was snarling.

“I’m an old woman, Barnes! Sometimes I forget things!” That would be Director Carter.

“Bull _shit_!”

Sharon took the rear entrance with Sam as back up. Bruce waited in the trees looking a bit green around the ears, though that might have been more from nerves than the Big Guy. Stark crouched in the periphery, all but useless without his suit but looking like he really wanted to contribute anyway.

Fury turned to Natasha. “Ladies first?”

She grinned and shook her head. “Age before beauty.”

He kicked the screen door open with a bang and Natasha followed him, gun drawn.

 

The drive to Director Fury’s cabin had been long and boring. Over the course of the drive Steve explained at least three times how he and Bucky could still be alive and so young, and Peggy, confused, old Peggy, had burst into tears all three times. Maybe it was the emotional exhaustion talking, or a trick of repetition but Keiko realized, with dawning horror, that these were the real articles.

She also realized what her grandfather had meant when he referred to them as “little shits.” Steve Rogers, whatever had happened to him, had zero respect for the road and he drove like the car was literally on fire and the only thing to put out the inferno was annihilating distance on the highway.

She could also tell why Old Jim Morita held them in such esteem, though he only said it with the tug of his smile, the promise of mischief in his eye. Scary and a little cold they might be, they loved Aunt Peggy and it showed. There was razzing, from Bucky, and Keiko got the distinct impression that there had been something of a brother-sister relationship between Peggy and Bucky by the way Peggy dished it right back. There was an easy gentleness between her and Steve, though. He rested a hand on Peggy’s, running his thumb over the prominent, scarred knuckles, papery skin, the wedding ring too big and loose on her finger. Keiko wished he would keep both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. Still, the part of her brain not fixated on the very real possibility of dying in a fiery car wreck marveled at the easy banter between the three of them, the last of the Howlies. She wondered if Bucky gave the others as much sass, easy and careless, right after bloody victories and bloodier defeats. She wondered if Steve had always been so earnest with the others, speaking plainly to let them know that they were the focus of his attention right now. She knew WWII was not a good time for Japanese-Americans, and her grandfather never spoke of his treatment in the army unless he was talking about how Captain Rogers treated him.

_“The man was an absolute godsend,” Jim Morita says, pushing a bishop into place._

_Uncle WIlliam frowns down at the board. “Better than Sawyer?”_

_“Nah, just different.” William worries a pawn between his fingers for a long moment before dropping it on a strategically-chosen square. Jim chews the end of a toothpick—a habit young Keiko originally thought of as a purely Gandpa trait, but would later learn that many veterans come home with a penchant for gum, chewing tobacco, toothpicks. “The Howlies were a different outfit, for sure,” Jim goes on. “We had our Captain, our sniper, our explosives expert, our secondary leader, our languages experts, our strategist, our field medic, and then there was me. We were a mixed bunch, but it didn’t matter. When Rogers talked to you, he was talking to you. Not to the people that look like you a million miles away. Not to the person you might have been if something was just a little different. And what you say matters, because I told him I was basically useless and he got this look on his face, and he pulls out this busted as hell radio and says “Can you make it work?” Yeah, I can make it work, whadaya take me for? So I’m working on it when Dum Dum points out that if he hasn’t called in already, he might as well blame equipment failure and skip the obligatory lecture on tardiness.”_

_“And then Frenchie explodes the ever loving crap out of that poor, defenseless radio before you make it to camp,” William finishes, smirking. “I heard this one. Your move.”_

_“Little shits, every single one of them.” He moves his rook halfway across the board and rests his hands on his knees. “Check.”_

They moved into the cabin in the weak light that filtered through the trees during the gray hour between sundown and true nightfall, with dewdrops forming on the sparse undergrowth and rolling in small beads off the leaves of the canopy overhead. “This is a safe place,” Aunt Peggy promised them, sinking into the lumpy couch. “Known only to a handful of trustworthy individuals. I originally planned to have it built in the seventies as a kind of Camp David, but I never got further than the blueprints.” She looked around the room, her beaming smile faltering. “Fury took over the plans for this place, and apparently also the interior design. If his decorating were anything to go by you would think the man had lost both of his eyes.”

Steve coughed hard into his fist and Bucky abruptly looked away, like they wanted to laugh but thought they weren’t allowed. Keiko ignored the way Steve settled beside Aunt Peggy with Bucky sinking into the cushion on his other side like this were the most natural thing in the world. Like they hadn’t come back from the dead at Hydra’s hands through some yet unspecified means. Like they somehow thought the intervening years could be reset like Peggy’s gossamer frail lucidity.

Keiko bit her tongue and explored the kitchen's contents. Trail mix, cooking oil, instant oatmeal, pancake mix, saltines and canned foods of all kinds, from Spam to soup to beets. A survey of the fridge turned up an empty water pitcher (what?), almost a dozen different condiments, a sack of forgotten apples (yuck), a mostly intact twenty-four pack of beer, and a jar of pickle spears. No milk or eggs, so pancakes were out but if they got really desperate the floury mix and water could be cooked into some kind of substitute mash. And how did this become her life, thinking up worst case scenarios and feeling like the only adult with three nonagenarians?

Still, the thought niggled at her. She chewed her thumbnail. Not much food here in the middle of nowhere, and if they got boxed in…a siege wouldn’t last very long. If it was just her and Aunt Peggy, they could hold out for a few weeks, but they had two huge soldiers to feed too, and she would bet good money they burned calories like her jalopy burned motor oil.

A delighted hoot from the living room caught her attention. She grabbed the pickles and the trail mix and wandered back to the others to see what the fuss was about. “Jack pot,” Bucky snickered, rubbing his hands together over the opened drawer of the coffee table. Keiko peered over his shoulder.

“A mousetrap?”

“What? No! Cards! Look!” Bucky picked the deck out of the drawer and waved it excitedly. 

Keiko regarded him coolly. “Do you even know how to play Uno?”

“The hell is Uno? Cards is cards, doll. We’re playing poker tonight.”

The four of them crunched their way through the pickles and started in on the trail mix within a few minutes. Watching Bucky shuffle the deck was an experience and Keiko found herself peering into a past that did not belong to her once again, into crowded dancehalls and battle stricken mess halls and Bucky, the cardsharp, a patter thick with Brooklyn drawl and just enough innuendo to keep your eyes on him. Peggy found a pack of cigarettes in the other drawer of the coffee table (“Nick quit the habit eleven years ago.” “Peg, those smokes ain’t but four, maybe five weeks old.” “He quit the habit but it never quit him. Anyone have a light?”) and it only took a few minutes before Steve found the beer (“Light beer? You mean piss water?” “If you don’t want it—“ “I never said I didn’t want it! Gimme it back, ya punk. Jeez.”) and soon they were trying to negotiate the Uno deck into a poker deck with a haze of smoke hanging on the air. Keiko settled in to wait for Bucky and Peggy to hash out the peculiarities of the deck and cracked open a can of beer for herself.

“Uh, don’t you think you’re a bit young for alcohol? You’re, what, fifteen? Sixteen?” Steve asked, eyebrow raised.

She blinked. “No,” she said slowly. “I’m twenty-three.”

“Get out of town,” he gaped.

“Okay!” Bucky barked. “So wilds are kings, skips are queens and jacks are going to be ‘draw cards.’ And no cheating, Steve.”

“I don’t cheat!” he whined.

“Yeah, okay, pal.” Bucky dealt the cards and Keiko frowned at her hand.

“Guys, I have no idea how to play poker.”

“What?” Bucky cried. “How did you make it to the age of sixteen without learning poker?”

“Seriously, I’m twenty-three.”

They didn’t make it halfway through her crash course before Peggy lost her footing and asked Steve which ones were kings: skips or wilds? “You can’t just talk across the table when it’s convenient for you!” Bucky groaned, at wits end, metal hand beginning to crease the Uno cards and his flesh hand pulling through his longish hair.

“I’m an old woman, Barnes! Sometimes I forget things!” she shot back.

“Bull _shit_!”

And then the door to the cabin exploded. Or at least that was what it sounded like to Keiko’s ears. Her world turned upside down, metaphorically speaking. Literally speaking, Alpha grabbed Peggy and Keiko and pulled them to the floor and the couch flipped and slid, Bucky placing a barrier between them and the threat.

The threat…

“Freeze,” Fury barked. It was the kind of command given by someone used to being obeyed without question. It was the kind of command that sank into your blood, danced down your bones and built a nest of unease in your gut. It was, in short, the kind of command only a fool would disobey. “Drop your weapons.”

Keiko swiveled her head in slow motion, one hand pressed to Peggy’s thin shoulder. Steve and Bucky stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the couch, handguns drawn. And they had frozen upon Fury’s command, but she doubted they were going to put down their guns. “I said drop ‘em!”

“Nicholas. Joseph. Fury.” Keiko never saw Aunt Peggy angry before, but the old woman shook with rage under her hand and though she sounded winded the words dripped with anger. “What. The hell. Do you. _Think_. You are _doing_?”

His nostrils flared, but he otherwise gave no indication of hearing a word she said. “Please get yourself to safety, ma’am. These men are not who you think they are. They are very dangerous Hydra operatives." He raised his voice a few decibels to address the soldiers. "Put down your weapons. You are surrounded, outmanned and outgunned.”

To the naked eye, nothing changed. Steve and Bucky did not move, did not twitch. They didn’t even blink. But something in their eyes shifted. The title Winter Soldier had been used, a loose scrap of information tossed out during the car ride here, and it meant something to Peggy but not to Keiko. The title reemerged in her mind now as she blinked up from the rough floorboards at the Steve and Bucky of legend. Keiko never made it a habit to pity gun-waving, door-kicking, threat-making home invaders, but she made an exception for Fury and whoever he roped into surrounding the cabin.

She did not hear the footsteps in the hall, but Bucky pivoted and he held his gun steady on the two newcomers, another man and woman pair. Fury sucked in a breath. “We can do this the hard way, or the easy way,” he promised.

Steve’s lips curled. “We will not be your toys, Director. You don’t have the wherewithal to break us into your clockwork soldiers, and we will not go quietly.”

“Stand down, Nick,” Peggy ordered.

The room held its collective breath. Keiko waited for the first gunshot, the first unretractable mistake, the first blood.

“I didn’t know you drank light beer, Nick.”

Who thought it was a good idea to bring Tony Fucking Stark? It was about that moment Keiko decided on the title of her memoir, _Who Invited Tony Fucking Stark and Other Questions I Shouldn’t have to Ask_. There comes a certain point when the surreality of real life overloads the mind and she suspected she just hit her personal threshold.

Tony Fucking Stark did not seem to notice the guns being pointed in everyone’s faces. He weaved through the room, sipping on his beer, found the computer desk and dropped into the swivel chair there. Behind him, a bespectacled man hunched in a perpetual cringe darkened the doorway and shifted his weight from foot to foot. Stark took a fortifying drink from his beer and grinned. “Well this is nice. How is everything, Capsicle? Getting your marbles back in order? And how are you doing, Sargesicle? Old ball and chain treating you right?”

“Is this an op that really requires the Avengers, Fury?” Steve demanded.

“This isn’t an Avengers op.”

“Is that why you have the Black Widow, Iron Man and the Hulk onsite?”

“Looks like an Avengers op to me,” Bucky confirmed.

“Nick, have you lost your mind?” Peggy hissed. “Drop your gun!”

“Peggy, I have the situation under control.”

“Yes, we can all see how much all these guns are calming everything right down. Good job, Nick.”

“How about we all just lower our weapons,” Bucky suggested. He spoke slowly, using a calm, reasonable tone and Keiko could almost trick herself into believing he knew what he was doing. And then he used the words she was kind of hoping he wouldn’t. “I’ll even start.”

 

Doctor Friedberg did not consider herself a religious woman. She was a scientist. She followed the careers of people with names like Sagan, Pinker and Skinner. She wore the scent of formaldehyde like perfume throughout grad school. She could eyeball quantities of chemicals in metric increments (even before her brief but promising career as a drug dealer in undergrad but least said soonest mended). No, Jeanette Friedberg belonged to a universe of differential action-reaction and the hum of eternal background radiation, but that did not leave her completely bereft when she needed nonsensical whimsy to see her through.

She pressed the little medallion, a coin more than anything, to her lips and she prayed to Saint Anthony because it was his face on the medallion and because she couldn’t remember what the other saints were for.

It had been a long time since Sunday school.

The doctors said Ramirez was in a bad way. He would live—the ambulance was able to get him to the ER in time, and the ER, the OR and ICU were able to get him stabilized in fits and starts. They put him on morphine for the time being and, thankfully, the man slipped in and out of consciousness without pain. He lay on the stiff, white sheets of the hospital bed, looking stiff and white himself, a far cry from the energetic man she knew him to be only the other day. The doctors said Ramirez was in a bad way; he may never recover the full function of his arm.

They tried to spin it. They threw around statistics like they meant something out of context, like a twenty percent chance of partial recovery meant Ramirez would fall into that group. She asked for studies, reports, research, and the doctors had blustered and tried to throw Latin at her, like just because she had cerebral palsy meant she was also undereducated. She didn’t make it out of University of Chicago without knowing her Latin, Greek and German, a fact that she explained using the most roundabout phrasing she could muster, smiling the whole time. The doctors left her alone after that, but they never gave her the sources of their fantastical statistics. A pity; of everyone in that hospital she might be the only one who would be able to parse a methods and results section of a peer-reviewed research article. She wouldn’t mind learning these people a thing or two, that was for sure.

And Ramirez wasn’t the only one she was worried about. Friedberg was no spy. Her job was about fifty percent paperwork and fifty percent research. She was a neuroscientist and a psychologist besides, but one cannot work for an intelligence agency like SHIELD for upwards of twenty years without picking up a thing or two. She always knew that danger lurked in the world, often unnoticed, usually unexpected, and it had a tendency to leap out at you when your guard was down, or get you when your guard was up. She also knew that whatever was coming had begun to hit the fan, because the Winter Soldiers, her prized subjects, had been moved without proper authorization, Nick Fury was in the wind, Agent Sitwell started asking questions and Guthman never made it home from work.

Friedberg clasped and unclasped her hands. Guthman was a puzzle: Who would abduct her, an old woman in the psych department? and why? and how? She was a smart cookie and her years with SHIELD, like Friedberg herself, made her cagey when things didn’t smell right. Friedberg worried the little brass medallion between her fingers, listened to Ramirez’s steady breaths.

She didn’t have all the pieces yet. Guthman worked with the Winter Soldiers—she worked with quite a few participants, clients and patients—and Rogers and Barnes had disappeared after putting Ramirez out of commission (almost permanently). In one of his brief spurts of consciousness, he called it a gift, and she couldn’t pull it out of him how exactly a bullet through the shoulder and copious amounts of blood loss counted as a gift, but it made her think of the lesser of two evils. She suspected Rogers was disinclined to miss his targets at point blank range by mistake. Perhaps Guthman, Fury and the Soldiers were in cahoots to some distant end, but the idea sounded stupid, even in the sanctity of Friedberg’s head.

She watched Ramirez sleep and checked his water pitcher again. It was still full, like the last three times she had checked it. She worried the medallion on its little yellow chain, a tawdry little bauble her mother left her, perhaps in the ill-advised hope that it might compel her to carry her rosary on her person, or visit the inside of a church. Foolish thoughts from a foolish woman, but Friedberg still found herself running her thumb over the brass coin, and she murmured the recitation her mother taught her when she was a child, half a prayer and half a spell. “Tony, Tony. Come around," she rasped quietly. "Something’s lost that. Can’t be found.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prayer to Saint Anthony is a real one! 
> 
> "Defrosted super soldiers encountering and trying to use an Uno deck" sounds like a good prompt. Also, the idea that Fury's cabin only has an Uno deck for entertainment really amuses me for some reason. My original idea for this chapter was that Fury and Co. would waltz into the cabin like they own the place (Fury actually owns the place) only to find our heroes smoking his smokes, eating his food and demolishing his beer. There would be a moment of stunned silence and then Bucky peers around the corner from the kitchen, sees Fury, and just says "I think you're out of Cookie Crisp," like he hadn't been wolfing it down by the fistful ten minutes ago. Also, the mental image of Fury purchasing and consuming Cookie Crisp gives me life. 
> 
> The cabin in this chapter is canon in Agents of Shield; in the show Coulson mentions that a freshly defrosted Steve Rogers spends some time there to acclimate to his new situation. So I had to get my Soldiers there one way or another. IRL, cabins are tiny. I recently stayed in one: It is a shed with bunk beds and a convenient light fixture- not the bungalow Coulson visits in AoS, or the ranch/house/place portrayed in this fic. 
> 
> People suffering from sudden bouts of bullets ripping through their bodies, commonly referred to as "flesh wounds," have been known to suffer grisly complications often not shown in movies or television. An injury to the shoulder or any major joint for that matter is Serious Business. In general, bullets are incompatible with human physiology, so feel free to quietly thank the people who willingly put their fragile bodies between the public and sprays of gunfire. 
> 
> Kudos are always welcome, as are comments.


	9. The Man with a Plan (or: The Man Who Arranges the Blocks)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How long before Insight is operational,” Alpha demanded, using his reasonable voice. 
> 
> “Soon. The Chitauri invasion gave the World Security Council the kick they needed to really get it going. The helicarriers should be airborne any time now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title for this chapter comes in part from the First Avenger and also the Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWTFG3J1CP8

Fury could not be trusted, nor could the Widow or the two unknown agents pulling up the rear. Any one of them could be Hydra, and it was even money they would try to take Alpha and Bucky into custody for their own use. Tony Stark could not be trusted if his previous behavior was anything to go by; the man presented himself as a verbose businessman, but he was mercurial and the untimely death of his father at Bucky’s hands easily overshadowed his commitment to doing what he conceived of as the Right Thing. Banner, while his own man, would no doubt follow Stark’s lead.

Alpha did not like so many guns being pointed at him and Bucky, in a small room with Peggy so close. He felt naked without his shield. And then Bucky started to lower his gun.

The next move depended on Fury’s party. They could open fire—a risky proposition—or they could lower their weapons—unadvised if they believed the Winter Soldiers to still be under Hydra’s control. Even Fury, for all his pomp and attempts at omniscience, could not yet know that in the making of the Soldiers Hydra conjured phantoms they could not control. The ghosts would not be banished again, not to electronic Chairs, not to cryogenic tanks, not to a life of dossiers and bullets and targets without context.

The cabin had a square table in the kitchen, pushed to the far side, that Banner took hold of and dragged to the center of the kitchen so that it could be seen from the couch in the living room. There were only two chairs, but Alpha never minded standing before and he was hardly about to start now. Fury took one chair and made a show of arranging himself, one arm thrown over the back of it so his chest was as open as possible—a demonstration of superiority, or perhaps of arrogance.

Alpha found the whole thing…disappointing. And as cliché as it might have been, he expected Fury to be taller. Not taller by much, per se, but the dossier Pierce gave him painted an almost larger than life figure and Alpha, always a notch too suggestible for comfort, took the information given to him at face value. Fury postured in his chair and curled his lips, a show of comfort, almost mocking: a show that went unappreciated because the Winter Soldiers could not be intimidated, ruffled or otherwise upset by anything short of bazooka force.

Fury looked Alpha up and down like he expected him to take the chair opposite, but Alpha had something else in store. He pulled the chair out and smiled. “Ma’am.” Fury’s face fell when Peggy sank gratefully onto the seat, flashing Alpha a bright smile. She folded her hands on the table. Good hands, Alpha acknowledged to himself, hands that did the job, hands that got dirty, hands that proved their capabilities over and over. They had always been lovely; she kept her nails scrupulously clean and trimmed short, the fingers were long and slender, feminine, the palm broad and warm but hard from battle, or training, or what have you. Good hands. Now they showed their wear: papery skin stretched over blue, blue veins, the nails still clean and short but brittle, the joints hard and knobby but, thankfully, not inflamed. The years softened her palms and fingertips, but he could still make out the winding scar down her left arm from an assault gone sour during the War, and the indistinct scarring over well-used knuckles. And the wedding ring. It was loose on her finger now, a consequence of shrinking with age, but it shone bright and hard. It was the kind of ring he would want her to have, whether by his hand were they able to stay together After, or by Bucky’s as per his discreet request, or any fella fortunate enough to catch her eye. He briefly wondered how many sad bastards she clocked with her ring hand before retirement.

The Soldiers never much participated in negotiations. They barely participated in debriefs. Hydra found it easier to aim them at a target and let them loose than risk too much on the right turn of phrase applied at the right moment. Peggy and Fury haggled. They haggled over the Soldiers’ origin, over their agency, their stability, how they should be handled from here on out since they weren’t going to go anywhere quietly. Alpha kept only one ear on the situation.

“And what happens if their faces get smeared on the news, Ms. Carter?”

Did Peggy keep her last name? That sounded like something she would do.

“Then we’ll deal with it. If I recall, Agent Romanoff splashed her lovely mug all over the news networks following Tony’s shenanigans, and again during the Chitauri invasion.”

“Agent Romanoff isn’t exactly a role model.”

“I resent that,” the Widow called from her place on the couch, a handful of trail mix in one hand and a beer in the other. Bucky watched her from the corner of his eye; she could pass as at ease, but he trained her to do that. Alpha suspected she watched him just as closely, perhaps looking for whatever tells might be leftover from a lifetime of wipes, or for new tells only recently learned.

“They’re dangerous!” Fury snapped, exasperated.

Peggy leaned back and crossed her arms with a huff. “And so am I. So are you. All of us are dangerous in our own special ways but that doesn’t mean any of us should be put down like dogs.”

“Even the life of a rat has worth.”

Any group of people carries a level of background noise wherever it goes. If the group is eating, that noise involves cutlery, chewing, chatting, the shift of food from one place to another. That background noise in the living room came to an abrupt halt and all eyes turned on Alpha about the same time he realized the words had slipped past his lips without permission from his brain. For a heartbeat, abject terror flooded through him, because speaking out of turn during a negotiation was met with correction, and speaking something so sentimental, so uselessly human, was due a thorough reprogramming _and he wouldn’t go he wouldn’t they couldn’t make him he would kill maim destroy anyone who tried please no no no_

And then breath rushed back into his lungs because Fury did not have the manpower or the expertise to reprogram anyone, let alone Alpha, and Peggy wouldn’t allow it, surely. She wouldn’t.

“That’s right, Steve,” Peggy said. He did not recall her standing up or closing the space between them, but she stood before him now and rubbed his hands between her own. Still in the grip of his human madness, the worry that he would get her dirty, would contaminate her with his awfulness, it tightened his chest and then it was gone, a flash in the pan. He made himself breathe. She rubbed his hands between her own (had her hands always been so small?) and a half smile tugged at her mouth. “Every life has worth.” The smile died on her lips. “SHIELD failed you for nigh well seventy years. We failed to find you, and we failed to destroy Hydra, and we failed to keep you safe when you were in SHIELD custody. I’m sorry.”

He blinked. Peggy had nothing to be sorry for. None of it could ever be imagined as her fault. “It doesn’t matter,” he rasped. He stepped out of her space so that his shoulder blades pressed into the cool wall and addressed Fury. “You mentioned something called Project Insight. That’s how you knew something was wrong after Agent Romanoff tipped you off.”

Fury crossed his arms. “Yes. And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.”

Alpha was going to inform him that he would do well to hesitate before making such generous claims but Tony Stark interjected. “No, I think we need to hear more, Nick. Because Hydra wants Insight and we’re all dying to know what they cooked up under your watchful eye.” He did not bother looking up from his phone, sliding vigorously from one side to the other, probably playing some kind of game.

“Whatever it is it won’t be good,” Bucky added.

“Let me put this another way, Project Insight has a security clearance level of nunya: nunya damn business.”

“Mm-hmm,” Stark grunted, and then waved his phone in Fury’s direction. “That’s interesting because according to JARVIS, Insight looks like some kind of Death Star deal.” Alpha had no idea what a “Death Star” was, but the term seemed to have meaning for the rest of the group because the entire cabin erupted in disbelieving noises. Stark waved them to quietness. “I think you better elaborate, Nick. Because it’s not looking good.”

“It’s not a Death Star,” Fury sighed, shaking his head like he couldn’t imagine where Stark would get the idea. “Since Stark apparently knows everything and he’s just going to spout off inaccurate analogies about it, let me be clear. Project Insight is three next generation helicarriers synced to a network of targeting satellites.” Alpha resisted the urge to bang his head against the wall, but only just. Bucky shifted his weight from one foot to the other and then was still again, his face betraying nothing. “They are capable of continuous suborbital flight.”

“Which is why you wanted me to work repulsors into your old granny turbines,” Stark added, unimpressed. “You had me work on your Death Star.”

“Quit calling it a Death Star. It’s better than a Death Star!” Fury cried. “It doesn’t annihilate an entire planet. The satellites can read a terrorist’s DNA before he steps outside his spider hole, and the turrets are sophisticated enough to deliver a clean headshot. No more drones. No more shock and awe. It can even neutralize a threat before it happens.”

Banner stood up abruptly, nearly unseating Stark from his perch on the arm of the couch. “Excuse me,” he muttered, and took himself outside, into the chilly night air.

The man named Sam nodded, his jaw hard. “I’m with that guy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cleaner, more efficient warfare. I’m down for ‘death from above.’ But should we really be making preemptive strikes the rule instead of the exception.”

Natasha shook her head. “Director, you said something happened with Insight?”

Fury’s face twisted. “I was under the impression I was in control of that initiative. It appears I was mistaken.”

“How long has this operation been in the works?”

They all turned to look at Bucky, who kept his eyes on the floor. It seemed Fury would not give up that information, not at Bucky’s request, but he relented under Peggy’s glare. “All the technology has been perfected over the years for other projects. We’ve had helicarriers and satellites for years, and we’re only now scratching the surface of high precision long distance weaponry. Stark has had repulsors in his earliest suits. Insight puts them together.”

Bucky shook his head. “Do you think you came up with Insight?”

“I _did_ come up with Insight,” Fury scoffed.

Bucky waved him to silence before he could continue. “You didn’t. As you said, the technology has existed for quite a while. Hydra has always wanted high precision long distance weaponry; that’s why they funded the Red Room, sent me to oversee the Black Widow program, dumped the Winter Soldier in every godforsaken hellhole they could get away with. And then drones happen, and Ironman happens, and suddenly Hydra realizes they can have all the death and order they want with half the manpower. _Do I look like I’m finished talking?”_ Fury shut his mouth. “And for all you talk about terrorists and spider holes I bet you started sweating bullets the minute you realized you weren’t running the show. Because a weapon of that magnitude is perfectly safe in your hands, but in someone else’s? It’s unthinkable. Conveniently unthinkable.” Bucky let out a shaky breath. “You built an unstoppable killing machine to be wielded by men who are only flesh and bone, by men who crack under pressure or live to bow with age, and you had the nerve to believe it could never fall into the wrong hands, into any hands but your own. Did you know you were supposed to be our next target? I don’t know why I bother—I bet Insight or Death Star or whatever you wanna call it has a taste of your DNA, Director. I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar it has a taste of mine, too, and Steve’s, and anyone who might be a threat to Hydra. And there’s no spider hole we can hide in where we will be safe.”

Stark was the first to recover. “Good going, Nick,” he blustered. “You’ve gone and killed us all. And Sam keeps eating the chocolate chips in the trail mix.”

“Bite me.”

“How long before Insight is operational,” Alpha demanded, using his reasonable voice.

Fury blew a breath out from pursed lips and rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Soon. The Chitauri invasion gave the World Security Council the kick they needed to really get it going. The helicarriers should be airborne any time now.”

Alpha filed the new information into the ever shifting kaleidoscope of his mind and the pieces of strategy began falling into place. Now he needed only to create unbroken rows. “We have a limited frame of time to act. Hydra has Insight, an initiative meant to put the Winter Soldier out of business, with the kind of devastating killing power that can ensure Hydra’s stability for generations to come.” He pushed his hands in his pockets. “We have a Black Widow, a Hulk, an Ironman, two Winter Soldiers, Agent Carter, Young Agent Carter, a Keiko, limited firepower, SHIELD compromised and probably waiting to kill us when we show ourselves, and six beers.”

“Five,” Stark corrected.

“Five beers,” Alpha amended. He stretched his arms over his head and cracked his knuckles. “Let’s get to work.”

The fact that everyone was resigned to SHIELD being outed as compromised was a relief. Alpha would have liked to say he was not at all surprised when Natasha suggested dumping the SHIELD and Hydra files on the internet, but that would have been a lie. It was too easy to forget she was trained by the best, trained by Bucky, when she insisted on segregating the peanuts from the almonds of her share of the trail mix and ate every morsel one at a time.

“That includes all your identities,” Bucky warned her, face and voice neutral. “Every cover, not just for you, but for your friends. Where is Hawkeye?”

She did not flinch. “Clint is a big boy, and so am I. Well. You know what I mean. And SHIELD needs to go down. Like Bruce said, all the apples are rotted, better throw out the barrel.”

“No more career,” Sharon murmured into her beer.

“Empires rise and fall every day,” Natasha reminded her with a flip of her hair. “I’ve accepted that. Sometimes it’s better to bargain for the life of one man than to bargain for the lives of many.” Her eyes fell on Bucky for only a moment and then she was looking back at Sharon. “Besides, with skills like ours I’m sure we can find work after SHIELD hits the fan. I hear Subway is always hiring sandwich artists,” she deadpanned. Stark sputtered beer across the room and went into a coughing fit. Natasha looked immensely pleased with herself.

Alpha cut in before Stark could run his mouth. “We can deal with the after math when Hydra doesn’t have Insight pointing guns at every threat they have, real or imagined.” He folded his arms and let the open slots in his plan present themselves. “If we’re going to war, then we’re going to need uniforms. Wilson, you look like you have something to contribute.”

Sam Wilson shifted in his chair, sitting just a little straighter. “I, uh, I brought something like a resume. It’s in the car. If we can break into a high security government facility I can provide air support, which would be a good idea if these helicarriers are going to be seeing some stratosphere any time soon.”

Alpha and Bucky exchanged a loaded look. Bucky huffed and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, fine,” he growled. “But no punching tanks. I’m serious, Steve.”

Alpha was honestly surprised he got away with it for as long as he did, but something about making the decision to infiltrate a secure federal building broke the spell. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Not so fast there, Robocop. Who died and made you king?” Stark blustered.

The sentiment came from nowhere, but suddenly Alpha found himself possessed by the inane urge to yell something along the lines of _For fuck’s sake!_ It disappeared as soon as it came, mist on the wind. “You’re right, Stark. Who should take point on this op? Insight was Fury’s project, maybe he should be in charge of it and we can just trust that he won’t find a way to salvage the helicarriers to build a Death Star more fully under his control. Assuming Hydra doesn’t still take orders from him.”

Fury got to his feet so quickly he nearly upset the table. “I’ll have you know--!”

“Pierce has a framed photo of you in his office,” Bucky barked over his complaints. “You two are awfully close considering you’re such an innocent bystander.” Bucky dropped his voice suddenly, leaving a shocked stillness after his thunderous outburst. “It’s a shame we only put Pierce in the Chair, Cap. Maybe we should have taken all of the brass and wiped ‘em, just to be safe.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Alpha said before Fury could find breath to yell more. “I’m sure Fury wasn’t in on it, but he’s still a little too close to this to be an impartial leader. What about you, Peg?”

She blinked at him. “Steve? I’m sorry, had a senior moment. What are we yelling about?”

He smoothed her hair, a fond gesture. “Never mind, Director Carter. You look tired; do you need a rest?” Bucky stepped in and offered her the crook of his arm. She took it with a derisive snort and they made their way to the bedroom. “Gosh, who does that leave? What about you, Mr. Stark? You have no formal military training and limited knowledge of coordinated armed assault on high security properties. But I’m sure your IQ and your degree in engineering can compensate.”

Stark visually deflated. “Um.”

Bucky returned to them on silent cat feet, an imprint of Peggy’s lips in her favorite red lipstick on his cheek. He grinned. “Eat your heart out, Rogers.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “I don’t want Keiko within fifty miles of this op,” he continued, running down the list of names.

“Seconded,” Keiko piped up.

“Sam Wilson, how do you feel about taking the lead?”

“Rather be the eyes in the sky, truth be told. It’s a heavy responsibility and I’m not cut out for that level of leadership. Yet.”

“Fair enough,” Steve conceded, and he was really feeling more like a Steve than an Alpha. He didn’t feel that cut out for leadership either, but who could he trust to do the job right?

“Agent Carter, how do you feel about taking point?”

“Does it matter?” she answered, tone tinder dry. “You missed it earlier, but Stark doesn’t trust me not to be Hydra and Fury wants me, what did you say? in the belly of the beast.”

“Not a bad idea, actually,” Steve mused, and let the blocks arrange themselves as they fell. “A pair of eyes on the inside could give us an edge we wouldn’t normally have. Agent Romanoff?”

“An undercover agent in the right place at the right time does wonders,” she agreed.

“How would you like to be in charge of this mission?” Besides Fury or Stark, he knew Romanoff could be a major sticking point in the leadership of the op. She was smart, devious, well trained; if she wanted to oust him from his presumed leadership role he couldn’t fight her. And he didn’t want to, either. Overall she would be a good choice, assuming she wanted the role and the others would follow her.

The Widow seemed to follow the same train of thought for a moment. They watched each other and let the silence drag on. “Pass,” she said at last. “I’ve been on enough missions playing as a glorified cat herder.” That, and if the mission fell apart she wouldn’t have to claim responsibility. It was a heavy thing on his shoulders; he only hoped he could carry it to the end of the line.

“What about Bruce?” Stark whined. “Doesn’t he get a vote?”

“No,” Steve replied. “I have plans for the Hulk.”

“Do they involve smashing?” Fury asked dryly.

“So much smashing,” Steve levelled back at him. “I just wish we had three of him. We’re going to have to compromise. Chin up, Nick. It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything.”

 

That night the Winter Soldiers pretended to sleep on the floor, curled close together. The couch pulled out into a bed which Sharon and Natasha shared; Peggy and Keiko bunked together in one bedroom (“Aunt Peggy rolls around all night! She still fights Nazis in her sleep, I swear!”) and Fury and Tony took the adjacent bedroom. Bruce and Sam slept in the car outside, both apparently accustomed to sleeping in cramped spaces. Steve welcomed the cold hard floor against his side and listened to all the people in the cabin breathing. It felt strange to be in charge of them, to have people under his command again, but also welcome in its way. Like he was finally fulfilling his purpose. Like a weapon satisfying its commission.

“No one asked you.” Bucky pitched his voice so low that were Steve any farther away he wouldn’t have heard him at all.

“Asked me?” he whispered back, the words barely stirring the two inches of air between their faces.

“If you wanted to take point.” Bucky watched him through his eyelashes.

“Will you follow Captain America into the jaws of death?” he breathed.

Bucky pressed his warm, rough palm to the side of Steve’s face, let the pad of his thumb brush against the delicate skin under his eye. “Will Captain America lead these crazy bastards into the jaws of death?” he challenged. “You don’t have to, you know. You don’t owe them anything. You can walk away any time and they can’t say boo. I got your six no matter what you decide.”

“Do _you_ want to walk away?”

Bucky huffed derisively, almost silently. “Hell no. I wanna find every Hydra base from here to the Yangtze and burn it down. Start with their all-seeing sky borne murder machine and work my way down. I wanna put Hydra in the ground permanently. They’re not gonna stop otherwise. They’re going to hurt a lot of people. A lot of people are going to die, Steve.”

“That’s why I have to do this. Buck, we hurt a lot of people. _I_ hurt a lot of people. I can’t in good conscience rest until we finish this or this finishes us.”

“There he is,” Bucky teased, “the Man with a Plan. Would you believe I kinda started to miss that bastard?”

“Shut up,” he muttered. “And it’s not so much a plan as a game of strategy Tetris, where the stakes are impossibly high and you can’t see half the blocks.”

Bucky hummed, the sound barely reaching Steve’s ears at all. “When did we learn Tetris?”

“Hell if I know. But if you remember before I do, feel free to share.”

“So the Man with a Plan is really the Man who Arranges the Blocks,” Bucky mused, lips curling. “Now we just have to build unbroken rows.”

Steve nodded. “Get some sleep.”

“With the Black Widow at my back? Not likely. I trained her myself and if my admittedly shaky memory serves, I wouldn’t trust her as far as I can throw her.”

“I got your six, too. Get some sleep—that’s a direct order from your C.O.”

“Not my C.O.”

“Definitely your C.O. I’ll shake you in two hours so I can catch some rest too. Make ‘em count, Barnes.”

“Yessir.”

 

 

Guthman did not scare easily, but she might concede, under extreme duress, that she could be considered perturbed. Definitely distressed. Maybe a little alarmed if she let her imagination get away with her. Not that she let it, of course. She was being held captive in an underground cell with an armed guard in the hall and a Hydra agent might have removed her fingernails but that was no reason to get carried away.

Her hands hurt. The guy only peeled six of them off her before she passed out and then just left the rest alone. The lack of symmetry nagged at her; if she were any more bored she might just finish the job herself and take the other nails off. Then again, her cell somewhat lacked the necessary tools. They dressed her in loose blue scrubs, no drawstring, no shoes, no undergarments. She was cold. The damp coldness of the stone walls and concrete floor sank into her old bones, made her muscles cramp from curling into a tight ball whenever she managed to catch some sleep.

Sitwell promised to let her have a blanket if she complied. She promised to laugh the next time he said something so stupid. At the time he looked like he wanted to strike her, but he didn’t. He was too clever to give her that kind of power. He simply took the bedframe away from her cell so that her paper thin mattress sat directly on the floor.

“The room service here is appalling,” she goaded. Her armed guard paid her no mind. He never did. It should have been discouraging; Guthman built her career based around a disposition that could steamroll type A personalities in a pinch or pick at the most hardened operative until he or she relented (spies, unsurprisingly, treat psychological treatment like a KGB interrogation). Contrary to popular belief, knowing the tricks and quirks of the mind can’t help you fight down and dirty psychological warfare. The illusion stood all around her, transparent as glass: her power lay in words, and so they placed her in a place where her words had no power. Her trade depended on being able to write, so they had taken away her hands. Her mind was strong, so they let isolation soften it up from the inside out, and put strain on her body to hurry it along. She knew all the tricks, and it wasn’t going to help her one iota.

It should have been discouraging, but Sitwell and the greater Hydra collective forgot to account for one thing. Friedberg might call it plasticity, and Ramirez would probably call it fortitude. When Guthman was young, very young, when her mother was still alive, _she_ called it grit. Most psychologists in her field treated grit like a static characteristic, but Guthman preferred to think of it as a habit. Grit meant getting back up when you got knocked down. Grit meant smiling with blood on your teeth. Grit meant hating everything the mirror showed but looking anyway. People looked at her and saw an old woman, a cat lady, a washed up shrink. They didn’t see the way two failed marriages couldn’t keep her down, nor the abusive husband that thought he could make off with her sons. No one saw the knife wound that should have killed her (thank you, husband #1). They didn’t see a woman who almost didn’t make it out of grad school (thank you, crap car and crappier finances) but scraped by, or the woman who had to publish her work under a pseudonym because names like “Elizabeth” and “Guthman” weren’t in fashion at the time.

Grit, as she understood it, was a habit. A habit best perfected over the course of a long, hard life. A habit Guthman reinforced every day of that life, with every breath she took, so that it became ingrained from her thin skin to her brittle bones. Maybe it was just sentiment, or the foolishness of an old woman. Maybe she was going to die in this hole. Maybe she would never see the sun again, never nag her sons to visit, never do this or that or the other thing. But maybe she would, if she could just keep herself together.

The door down the hall rattled, beeped, clanked open and shut. Sitwell had a sure gait, certain footfalls but frequent. He took short steps. Contained. Like his suit might be a little over tailored, or he actually had a stick up his ass. So many possibilities. The man himself stepped into her view and smirked from the other side of the bars. “Are you ready to comply, Doctor?”

She scratched at the underside of her chin, contemplative. He wanted to play some psychological warfare, she could play too. “Have you been crying, Jasper?”

He blinked. “I…no. Oh, I see what you’re doing, and it’s not going to work.” He schooled his face back into a mask of smugness. Agents tend to be very good at that sort of thing. It did not bother her—after a few years she learned to drop half-formed suggestions in the conversation and let her clients soak them up, minds like clever sponges, and by the next session they were spitting out the conclusions she hoped they would come to, thinking they arrived to them all on their own. Her favorite clients left her sessions fully believing she did nothing but bounce ideas back at them, that therapy was a sham, and always in a significantly better place than they had been before their “sham” therapy. It was a matter of great professional pride to her.

God save her, but she was going to do the opposite here. She didn’t know what her title would be after she got out of here, but she wouldn’t be a “doctor” anymore. It was reprehensible, but it was also her ticket out of here and she was just enough of a bastard to enjoy the undertaking and just enough of a therapist to be able to admit enjoying it to herself. “You just seem so uncomfortable all the time, Jasper.” She let her eyes stray to the guard and back, barely a look, barely a saccade, and Sitwell did not react at all. He might not have noticed. But she knew that he did, and she let the half a suggestion fall, like a bomb on a night of broken glass, like a trusting comrade shifting weight from toes to heels enough to tip. She dropped her voice. “Are you well?”

He ignored her like a champion. “Any time you’re ready to divulge the location of the Winter Soldiers, you go ahead. But I wouldn’t hesitate too long if I were you. I have a meeting I need to attend. And it’s going to get very cold tonight.”

She was already very cold. Threats along the lines of more of the same didn’t do much for her. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she replied blandly. “While you’re here, I was wondering if there’s a bug going around? I have a new guard every day it seems like.”

His eyes flicked, barely a look, hardly a saccade, but they landed on the guard and then back again. “There’s no bug going around, Doctor. Where are the Soldiers?”

She made a show of examining her remaining fingernails. She picked some dried blood out of a cuticle. “How should I know? I live _here_ now.” Half a suggestion ready? Ready. Falling? Fall away. Let him think of her as an immobile fixture. Let him notice peers taking sick days like it matters. Let him _worry_.  

“You know more than you think. What kind of things did you talk about in your sessions?”

“You tell me. It’s not like you don’t have access to my filing cabinet or my computer. Knock yourself out, Jasper.”

“Yes, and we currently have our best and brightest in linguistics and cryptology working over your case notes. Maybe you could speed it along a bit?”

She gnawed her remaining thumbnail like she was thinking about it. “I’m terribly cold.”

“I can bump the heat up,” he acquiesced.

“I miss my bed frame.”

“Okay. Fine.” He waited and she stared at the wall, eyes contemplative. “Well?”

“Well what? Bring me a file and I can start translating. After you bring me some things.” She beamed at him. “I’m happy to comply.”

It was the kind of turn of phrase she only heard in Hydra agents. Someone high up had a fondness for the term “comply” and he (or she) shoehorned it into the indoctrination process. Sitwell must have been happy to _comply_ rather than obey, rewarded for _compliance_ more than cooperation, told to clear his mind and _comply_ before being told to pipe down and conform. Such a little thing with such big consequences.

Consequences she couldn’t see immediately. Sitwell blinked at her, lips parting like she caught him offguard and then he was nodding. No, he was _complying_. “Of course. Blanket, heat, bed. And you’ll translate a file.”

“A page,” she tutted. Half suggestion ready? “Maybe.” Ready. Falling? “This is a quid pro quo arrangement, Jasper.” Fall away. Let him think of her as his grandmother, as someone who would call him by his first name. Let him think of their relationship as a give and take. Let him be happy to take what she gives him. She smiled back at him.

“Compliance will be rewarded,” he assured her. She would bet good money he had no idea the words had been chosen for him and put in his mouth. At least when she conditioned her interns to salivate at the word “Pavlov” they knew what she was doing to them.

“Compliance will be rewarded,” she echoed, and smiled just a little brighter. Humans love smiles; a happy face and an agreement are often all it takes to reinforce behavior in her favorite Great Apes. Hell, that was how she got her favorite college professor to wear tighter and tighter shirts—by the final exam her class had a betting pool on how many buttons he would pop during lecture. (The answer was two. Guthman lost $15 that day). And it was going to work on Sitwell if the way he turned on his heel and trudged back down the hall was any kind of indication.

She refused to feel guilty. Not that she had much of a say in the churn and roll of her gut. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A running theme I see in movies and the news is that better weapons are only okay if the nebulous "we" have them, but are atrocities and should be outlawed if "they" use them. I like to imagine the Winter Soldiers saying "If you can't get along, NO ONE can play with these fancy weapons!"
> 
> Conditioning people to act in different ways can be manipulative, but generally we as a society do it all the time without thinking about it. This is why phobias are contagious; if your parent or friend overreacts to something you will learn to associate that thing with fear. 
> 
> The major hard on for the word "comply" is canon in Agents of SHIELD. I don't know why, but it is.
> 
> When I was learning to do trust falls, my class had to follow a script: "Spotter ready?" Ready. "Falling!" Fall away! This prevented fallers from bonking their heads on the ground, and kept spotters from getting distracted.


	10. All in the Suit that You Wear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He did not expect Bruce’s expression to soften. “You’re doing well, you know. I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but you’re more,” he waggled his hand, “you. More than when we first met. I don’t know what you were like before Hydra, but I think we would have been friends.”

There are few things so unsettling as the kenopsia of visiting a public place after closing time. The usual noises of the day sink into the wallpaper, and if a soul were so inclined, he might be able to hear the echo of voices in the deadened hallway. Footsteps sound like gunshots and the simple creak of an opening door is an opening volley of war against sensitive ears.

The Winter Soldiers watched the security guard turn the corner from their position in the shadows, and then they were moving. Their ears pricked for unwelcome footfalls, they marched through the Smithsonian until they came across the World War Two exhibit, and through that to the end, to the section devoted to the Howling Commandoes and their intrepid Captain. The Soldiers tried not to look too hard at the photos of tanks, the cases of antique bullets, the vignettes of survivors and the love letters from people who weren’t so lucky. They did not look at the display of a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, and Alpha did not wonder if he might have made a difference if he hadn’t…

If he hadn’t.

The museum kept the Commandos exhibit small: a handful of panels about their mission, statistics and vignettes about all the members and a wall devoted to the Steve Rogers/Captain America transformation. This last Alpha certainly did not look at. He did not pause there, did not dare to see the discrepancies between he the imposter and the real artifact because he had a mission, damn it. He was going to war—he needed a uniform.

The end of the hall held their prize. A squat, rounded platform hosted faceless mannequins, all of them wearing the Commandos’ daily gear, and at the center stood the blank-faced figure meant to represent Captain America. Alpha breathed through his nose, skin prickling unpleasantly. The dummy was more worthy of the uniform than him, but the dummy wasn’t the one going to war. Alpha rolled his shoulders and got down to the business of picking the lock on the case.

At his side, on his mannequin’s right side, Bucky chortled to himself as he drank in the uniforms with hungry eyes. “Would anyone miss my jacket? Thinking about taking it with us.”

Alpha opened his mouth to tell him no, taking more of the museum’s exhibit existed so far outside mission parameters he might as well have made the suggestion from outer space, but what came out of his mouth was “Sure, why not?”

What the hell?

Of course, the jacket belonged to Bucky from Before, and technically it was still his, even if the Smithsonian payed top dollar for it. And Bucky always looked damn good in that jacket—it would be the summer one since he lost the winter one on his last mission as a Commando, so the jacket could still be worn for a few months, and then a few months more if he didn’t mind wearing warm shirts underneath it. Taking the blue jacket meant saving money on winter clothing and it was important to save money. He could not pin down why, exactly, that was important, but it seemed right.

The locking mechanism clicked and the door swung open without resistance.  The rest was quick: bundle up the uniforms, ignore the round tin shield prop, disappear into the night.

“Get that off your head,” Alpha muttered, zipping up his bag.

“I dunno. I think I can make it work,” Bucky deadpanned, eyes twinkling from under the brim of Dum Dum’s bowler hat. It was a forgery, no, a replica. Alpha remembered the real hat, with its ragged brim and clinging stink of cigar smoke. Bucky looked like an idiot with it on his head. Under Alpha’s unrelenting glare, Bucky heaved a sigh and replaced the hat on the Dum Dum dummy and followed Alpha back through the exhibit.

His grip on Alpha’s collar drew him to a stop in front of the panel devoted to Steve Rogers. “What?” he hissed, eyeing the floor at his feet.

“You used to be smaller.”

“That’s…that’s not me. We need to move.”

Bucky did not let go, but gave Alpha a rough shake. “What do you mean it’s not you?” he challenged. “You’re remembering more and more every day. You remember Peggy. What’s the problem?”

Alpha let out a breath, ears straining for the guard but the museum was silent all around them. “I only think I remember. It’s impossible to tell what memories are implanted, what memories aren’t and what my imagination is just making up. How can I be sure of who or what I am, really?” Bucky’s gray-blue eyes bored into him. “I’ve always been suggestible,” he continued, squirming. “I can’t trust what I remember, and I can’t trust the way I think when everyone around me is…If you called me by any other cover, I would just as easily fall back into that cover. Why is Steve Rogers any different?”

Bucky turned him, bodily pivoting him so that one metal hand gripped one shoulder and his flesh hand gripped the other. “In our line of work the truth is malleable at the best of times. The way I see it, and you can take this with a grain of salt, there is no Big Truth. There is no Truth that is true in every version of history. I’m finding more and more that reality is what you make of it. According to that panel over there I was born in Indiana and my family moved to New York when I was young, and we became best friends. That’s all true. But I remember my childhood in Moscow, and living with my _babushka_ after my parents couldn't support me anymore. I remember enlisting in the United States Army, and I remember volunteering to serve Mother Russia. I have two different realities rolling around in my head, and the two should be mutually exclusive but they’re not. Not to me.

“Maybe you don’t feel like a Steve Rogers. I get that. But at any given moment you feel like _you_ , no matter what your name is or what language you’re speaking, so why not borrow the name? You don’t have to act like your cover because no one is going to notice the difference, and if you start thinking like him and doing the things he would do, well, maybe that’s okay. Maybe you should be more like Steve Rogers; everyone seems to think he was a standup guy. Kind of a shit, but a good guy.” Bucky squeezed his shoulders and then let go all at once, taking a step back.

“I’ll think about it,” Alpha promised.

 

 

Brock Rumlow believed in Hydra, because Hydra believed in him when no one else did. It was a little thing, but it got him through the hardest parts of training. And Brock Rumlow believed that order came through pain. It was one of the kitschy little slogans his superiors threw around, like  _You got time to lean? You got time to clean._ or  _Loose lips sink ships_. It was another little thing, a story he told himself that didn’t have a happy ending. The best stories don’t.

A true believer, but not a fool, Rumlow knew that order came through pain, but chaos had some pretty good things to say for itself. He heard somewhere that chaos wasn’t a pit so much as a ladder; from what he could tell, most of Hydra’s politics thrived that way. Cut off one head, and create a power vacuum for some ambitious bastard to fill. Half the time, cutting off one head allowed for two more to grow in its place and, despite the competiveness the heads encouraged in their subordinates, the heads themselves were just cooperative enough to make it work. They kept the machine going.

The Winter Soldiers cut off one head. They put Pierce in the Chair, and maybe Rumlow should have felt bad, but he couldn’t muster up any sympathy for a man who let power and bureaucracy make him so soft. It was Pierce’s gun and Pierce’s bullet that took away Rumlow’s knee; he could afford to be a little bitter. The Winter Soldiers cut off one head and while Sitwell scrambled to get Insight together and get his hands on the Soldiers, Rumlow was left to clean up the mess. He dropped Pierce off at his daughter’s house with half a Strike team and two of the brainier technicians and took the reins.

He was going to do this right.

He went on enough missions with the Soldiers—six to be precise—to know that they functioned as a team, to know what their faces looked like, haggard and rough with stubble or hidden behind their masks. He knew them better than SItwell at any rate, who's only contact with them had been watching grainy footage from their cell at SHIELD and sending Rumlow to be his delivery boy. Rumlow knew them, but he didn’t know enough. So he did some research. He had to beg and borrow and steal to get the clearance needed to get the information he wanted: grease a palm here, drop a thinly veiled threat there, freeze a Swiss bank account here. It wasn’t easy, but soon he pulled together enough files and dossiers to get a better feel for his new adversaries. The throb of a bullet hole through his leg kept him up at night anyway, so he put that time to good use and he read. He read and he annotated the files and he read some more until his eyes stung and his neck ached, but at last he had the intel he needed. Grease a palm here, make a phone call there.

One brisk morning in the lull between doing his homework and waiting on a phonecall a pair of eggheads from Hydra medical fitted him for a metal brace to give him use of his leg back. “Sir, the brace runs on an energy cell that gives off some, ah, radiation.”

“I don’t care,” he told her bluntly.

Something in his tone, or perhaps in his eyes, had her cringing away. “It’s just…the radiation can make you sick or, um, unstable.”

“I don’t care!” he bellowed, and damn if that didn’t send her and her egghead friend scurrying. He kept an eye on his phone while they fitted him up. They clasped the metal bands tight over the bandages cushioning his ruined knee, arranged the wires until the fuel cell became live. Egghead 1 filled a vial with some clear fluid and depressed a needle into a vein near the wound site. Fire rolled through his veins, and maybe he should feel pain, but it just made him feel powerful. Invincible even. Egghead 2 tried to explain how to use and take care of his new mostly bionic leg, but he shooed them both out of the room when his phone jangled.

He brought the burner to his ear. “ _Da_?”

An elderly man wheezed into his ear in cracked Russian, giving him just the words he wanted to hear. He grinned to himself, thanked the old man and hit the end call button. He briefly entertained sending a gift basket to Minsk, but decided that when the end came he would send the Soldiers instead. With guns. And a tastefully vague kill order.

 

 

With Sharon Carter back working for SHIELD, returning Alpha’s vibranium shield and the Winter Soldiers’ tactical suits became a mere matter of sleight of hand. At the cabin Stark dropped the tac gear and the shield at Alpha’s feet where he sat on the couch, combing through pages of information regarding Insight and helicarriers in general.

“The most versatile substance on the planet, and dear old Dad made you a Frisbee,” he complained at length.

“Uh-huh.” Alpha missed the shield like a tooth but he knew better than to snatch it up from the floor and heft it in his hands. He reread the same paragraph on some kind of algorithm, a piece of technology so important half of the document had been redacted.

“It doesn’t even have lasers on it.”

“Stay away from my shield, Stark.”

“I could put little magnetic thingies on the straps so it’ll come back to you. Like a boomerang!”

“Stay. Away. From. My shield.”

“You’re the worst. They should call you Captain Buzzkill.” Stark let the silence drag out for a beat and, when Alpha seemed disinclined to break it, he went for the kill. “I’m still mad.”

“Obviously.”

Alpha did not move when Tony swept the documents out of his hands. The papers seesawed through the air and slid to the ground, his hand holding air. He let his eyes travel up to Stark’s face and it didn’t take a genius to read the cold anger there. “You killed my parents,” he gritted out when he knew his voice wouldn’t betray him.

“I couldn’t,” Alpha answered simply. He bent to pick up the fallen papers, trusting his back to Stark and, without hardly a thought, the truth as well. “My handler gave me the kill order and the rest of the mission is a blur. I ran. I didn’t know Maria, but I did know Howard and I. Couldn’t. They made Bucky do it instead, and then they put a kill order on me.”

Stark breathed hard through his nose. In and out. In and out. “That doesn’t make sense. How are you still breathing, then?”

Alpha shrugged. “Even when he has nothing, Bucky has me. I had no name, no cover, no escape plan beyond running. And then he came for me and I should have died. I all but lay down to let him finish the mission and he couldn’t. I don’t remember what comes next. I don’t know what stopped him—probably the same thing that stopped me taking out Howard. You’d have to ask Bucky yourself, but don’t let him know I remember.”

“Why?”

Alpha shrugged again. “He’ll make that kicked puppy face at me, and I think I’ve put it there too much for one lifetime.” He paused, brow creasing as he tried to pick out the words. “I’m sorry. About your parents. They didn’t deserve…I’m sorry.” Baseless sentiment, an empty platitude, but it felt like the right thing to say in this moment. It was the kind of thing Steve Rogers would say.

Stark turned on his heel. “Whatever.”

Halfway across the country, Bucky (in full Captain America regalia because Captain America wasn’t currently public enemy #1), Natasha and Sam burgled a Fort Meade to retrieve Sam’s wings. Trapped in the cabin, Alpha did not let himself worry about Bucky. He did not think about the chaos of legal action if he were to be captured. He did not think about the very real possibility that Natasha or Sam would make a spur of the moment judgement call and put lead slugs into Bucky’s unprotected six. He did not think about Hydra moles lurking in the shadows waiting for them. Alpha took out a paint brush and three cans of latex based paint: white, blue and red. He got to work.

 

“I feel so useless,” Bruce complained. On Day Three of their preparations Fury disappeared, presumably to meet with Agent Hill to get more intel on Insight, but with spies like him, who could be sure? Aside from Hill and Fury, a recurring name on the documents regarding Insight was one Jasper Sitwell and, naturally, Alexander Pierce. Alpha wanted to have a few choice words with Sitwell, but he made himself content to wait until Fury’s go ahead. Until then, the lab experiment that had gone right and the lab experiment that had gone wrong waited on the stoop in front of the cabin. The sun hung pendulous in the afternoon sky. Cicadas buzzed. With a mission still in the making, Alpha felt restlessness run through him; he hated the hurry up and wait routine, the energy that came with a clear objective shelved, the contracted focus of a diamond point drill with nowhere to go. He wished for something to do with his hands. He wished for a paintbrush and a canvas made of something other than vibranium, though the Winter Soldier never held a paintbrush in his life before today.

“You’re not useless,” Alpha assured him, voice even to keep from disturbing the lazy pastoral peace.

Bruce huffed at that. He watched Alpha from the corner of his eye, probably in what he believed was a subtle way. “You’re the real McCoy, then. Captain America back from the dead.” His feet shuffled against the stoop’s wooden boards. “I guess people like us are just too hard to kill.”

“Not really. A few well-placed bullets would put me down permanently. I don’t think the Hulk would go down for something as petty as machine gun fire.” The words came out of their own volition, and he didn’t realize how they would sound to another’s ears until they were out on the open air.

Bruce’s eyes shuttered. “You sure you want to fight alongside the Other Guy? There’s still time to back out. I wouldn’t blame you.”

Alpha pivoted himself so that he was facing Bruce fully. The good doctor stood there, unassuming, bespectacled, impossibly small for a man made of blood and bone. “The Other Guy?”

“The Hulk.”

“I know who you’re referring to.” Alpha parsed through the shifting kaleidoscope of his thoughts. “You talk like the Hulk isn’t you.” He thought of Steve Rogers, a distant specter who stepped into Howard Stark’s lab a skinny asthmatic and stepped out a hero.

“The Hulk is a giant green rage monster,” Bruce laughed. It wasn’t a kind sound. “He ruined my life.”

“Tell me.”

It was an old spy trick only a few operatives could master. It involved shutting up and listening. Too many agents got caught up with wanting a specific piece of intel, never realizing their targets were veritable springs of information. Later Alpha would tell himself that he needed Bruce to be performing at the best of his abilities, that a Hulk who felt more secure with the Captain (whoever, whatever _he_ was) would be a better asset. Alpha shut up and listened to Banner’s story about a clever scientist whose father was a general, and an attempt at a second Project Rebirth that went so far sideways it came out the other side into success territory, about running from the law and the military and every intelligence agency in the alphabet, about trying to do right by people in faraway places, about a monster made flesh.

“If you had any sense, you would see me for what I am,” Bruce concluded dryly. “And you would run for the hills.”

Alpha let his eyes wander the tree line, half of his faculties devoted to the threat of snipers in unseen nests and the other half chewing over Bruce’s words. “I’ve never had much sense,” he said at last. “And I’ve never been one much for running away. For what it’s worth, it sounds like General Ross did more to ruin your life than the Hulk did. The Hulk, the transformation process, probably saved your life.”

“Well, no one asked me if I wanted it.”

He rested a broad hand on Bruce’s shoulder to keep him from darting back inside the cabin. Alpha wanted to tell him about a wheezy little man brimming with anger and self-righteousness, about how he underwent a risky medical procedure and became a soldier, a wheezy little man made of rage and indignity and pain who could suddenly _fight back_. He wanted to tell him about a transformation in reverse, about having someone open up his mind and play, pulling Steve Rogers out and putting the Other Guy in. He wanted to tell him a ghost story with as many variations as tellers, but no one version ever says the ghost wanted it. “When you’re the Hulk,” he rasped, struggling to pick out words that wouldn’t draw unwelcome comparisons, “does it ever feel like…you have someone else…thinking your thoughts?”

Bruce blinked. “I don’t remember much. As the Hulk. But I can hear him scratching around in here.” He pressed his index finger to his temple, thumb cocked. “He’s always there, just beneath the surface, waiting. Why?”

Alpha shook his head. “I’m no giant green rage monster,” his mouth quirked at the phrasing, “but if you ever want to talk about racking up a body count while not quite yourself and being unable to remember it afterward,” he gestured to himself with a self-deprecating smile. _I’m you man._

He did not expect Bruce’s expression to soften. “You’re doing well, you know. I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but you’re more,” he waggled his hand, “you. More than when we first met. I don’t know what you were like before Hydra, but I think we would have been friends.”

“You mean if no one made us killing machines and dropped an alien apocalypse on us?” Alpha elaborated dryly.

That earned him a shallow laugh. “We would have gotten along like a house on fire.”

The sound of boots crashing through the underbrush and menacing Russian cursing heralded the return of Sam, Natasha and Bucky. Seeing Bucky dressed in the star and stripes gave Alpha pause—did _he_ look that stupid, Before? Sam carried what looked like a complicated metal backpack, so the mission could likely be counted as a success. “Report!” Alpha barked, cutting Natasha and Bucky’s rapid fire Russian arguing short.

She blew a few strands of red hair out of her face. “This idiot was seen!”

“It could not be helped!” Bucky shot back. “And it’s better they see Captain America steal Sam’s wings than the Winter Soldier.”

“How is that better? By this time tomorrow your star-spangled ass is going to be all over YouTube.”

“Avengers!” Alpha interjected. Natasha looked about ready to give him a violent piece of her mind, so he continued in a cooler tone. “Captain America is going to make his debut one way or another. We’re already at the top of SHIELD and Hydra’s most wanted list, the CIA and the FBI won’t be far behind. When we take out Insight we’re going to be putting SHIELD’s dirty laundry out in the open, but until then it’s a good idea to draw some public attention to what we’re doing. People are going to want to know why Captain America is robbing the government, and they’re going to make up conspiracies until we tell them.”

“And that’s a good thing?” Natasha challenged.

“It’s a great thing,” Alpha retorted. “They’re going to want to know why, and that means they’re going to listen when I make a spectacle of my own star-spangled ass. Has anyone heard back from Fury yet?”

“Yes,” Natasha replied. “And it’s not good news. Apparently Insight is a go in two days’ time, maybe even less. And Pierce pulled some strings to get himself out of SHIELD custody.”

“Pierce shouldn’t be able to do that,” Alpha said with a sinking feeling.

“The man is chock full of surprises. I think Sitwell is playing a bigger part than we thought.”

Alpha nodded to himself. “Fresh off a wipe it wouldn’t be hard to coach him back into his former role. Fortunately it doesn’t matter at this point; our next step is still to find Agent Sitwell and ask him some questions. Hopefully he’ll know how to keep Insight from leaving the ground and we won’t even need Sam’s wings.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“We’ll improvise.”

 

 

Jasper Sitwell was not having a good time. No one had any leads on the Winter Soldiers, some Captain America wannabe was stealing Hydra tech (technically the U.S. government’s tech, but he had no patience for technicalities today), his meeting with Senator Dumbass was messing up his schedule and Guthman was being problematic. He washed his hands for the ninth time that day. He was painfully aware of every doorknob, keyboard and bio scanner he touched. Why were people so filthy?

He spent the better part of his morning trying to make sense of Guthman’s clumsy handwriting and her inconsistent shorthand. He trusted an intern to take a page from one of her files and files of case notes, and she methodically schooled him on the Greek alphabet and its uses in statistics. The case note had been regarding the diet of the Winter Soldiers pre-containment and during SHIELD custody, with “fascinating” little caveats comparing their eating regimen to those of Reese monkeys. What he mistook for cryptic symbols in the margins of her notes turned out to be doodles of cats, and then she went on a tangent about the important differences between Norwegian long hairs (“Precious Viking kitties, good mousers, but difficult to groom without the proper knowhow, Jasper.”) and Maine Coons (“They have little M’s on their foreheads because they know what they’re all about. You’ll never meet a Maine Coon with an identity crisis.”) which somehow turned into a lengthy diatribe about the ethical breeding habits for Scottish Folds. The whole time he wanted to pull the conversation back to her case note, but the one time he tried she cut him off. “I’m trying to help you, Jasper. Why aren’t you letting me?”

He might have lost his temper and raised his voice. “You’re not helping me! You’re derailing this conversation and trying to get out of what you promised to do! _Why do you always do this_!?” His own shrill shout at the end caught even him off guard, especially since it wasn’t like he had interrogated Guthman for any length of time. But he was frustrated and could feel a cold coming on and she wasn’t helping.

And then she burst into tears, probably because he scared her, that last exchange finally pushing her over the edge. Through the balling and the blubbering he could only make out “…ungrateful child!” and “…at my time of life!” and “…doing the best I can!” It was pathetic and it made him die a little on the inside because, against all reason, he felt _bad_. She was some doddering old woman that he had grilled and tortured and grilled some more, the only lead on the Soldiers, but still an old lady. It felt like interrogating his own grandma, and that was a road he didn’t want to go down if he could help it.

“Fuck,” he muttered at his reflection in the bathroom. He shut off the water and dried his hands and ran to make it to his meeting on time.

Not that he should have bothered. Senator Stern was fifteen minutes late and spent the whole time nattering about his constituency problem. Sitwell and Stern stepped out of the building and into the early afternoon sunshine, surrounded by Stern’s entourage of body guards and a sweaty intern. “That’s a nice pin,” Stern remarked, apropos of nothing, and then he lightly fondled Sitwell’s lapel and ugh, why were people so awful? “C’mere.” Great, he went for a hug. Ugh. Stern wrapped his arms around Sitwell and he pretended to smile through it. Stern brought his mouth close to Sitwell’s ear. “Hail Hydra.” Ugh. He knew the code phrase to be more benediction than a confirmation of identity, that Hydra gave its members values to hold close, a future to work toward, a mythos to believe in, something worth dying for. But did they have to whisper it in each other’s ears like children exchanging secrets?

Ugh. He bid Senator Dumbass a fond farewell and hopped into the backseat of his car. “Drive,” he growled, and his chauffer pulled the car away from the curb and into the pull of traffic. Sitwell let himself sink in his seat and his eyes shut as he felt the car take a familiar route down the road, up a ramp, and onto the interstate.

“Something’s wrong, sir,” his driver said abruptly. Sitwell let his eyes fall open and glared at the surrounding traffic. Or rather, the lack of traffic. The interstate, usually lousy with motorists at this time of day, had maybe eight other cars in view. Ignoring the sinking feeling in his gut, he pulled out his cellphone only to find no signal.

“Someone is jamming cell service,” he said. They drove through the shadow of an overpass and he had no time to prepare for a metal arm to crash through the windshield, clutch the steering wheel and _rip it from its column._   “Are you kidding me?” he squawked.

 

 

Sitwell was not having a good time. One of the Winter Soldiers worked for the Captain America wannabe, who apparently was in cahoots with the Black Widow. “Tell us about Project Insight,” the wannabe ordered, spilling him onto the roof of the building he had just walked out of not fifteen minutes ago.

“What’s there to tell?” he panted. He shambled backwards to give him some breathing room but the Widow, the Soldier and the Wannabe only advanced, crowding him toward the edge of the building. He gestured at the Winter Soldier. “I thought you were a myth, you know. Up until the Chitauri Invasion. Where’s your buddy, the other one?” The Soldier’s face didn’t change. Wannabe looked thoughtful. “I just gotta say you two are real good at hiding. My people have been interrogating the psychologist SHIELD put in charge of you, but she doesn’t know anything. A real shame—she’s not going to last long.”

If the Winter Soldier cared, he didn’t show it. He hung back, a step behind the other two. He wouldn’t act unless ordered, so Sitwell turned to Wannabe America when he shot another question at him. “There’s an algorithm that controls Insight. What can you tell me about it?” The backs of Sitwell’s legs hit the concrete ledge separating the roof from a nasty fall and he made a show of pinwheeling his arms. Wannabe’s hands fisted in his lapels and he actually lifted Sitwell a few inches off the roof, his feet dangling helplessly.

He smirked through the adrenaline and the chasm of terror opening up his chest. “Is this little display really meant to imply you’ll throw me off the roof? Because it’s really not your style, Captain.”

For a gut clenching moment, Wannabe looked like he wanted to prove Sitwell wrong. His jaw worked for an eternal moment, but then he slowly, gently placed Sitwell back on the ground. He smoothed down the wrinkles he put on his jacket, and one side of his mouth turned up. “You’re right,” Wannabe America told him, voice soft but eyes hard. “It’s hers.” And then the Black Widow planted her boot hard enough in his chest to send him toppling over backwards, screaming.

“You’re full of surprises,” Natasha told him while the three of them watched Sitwell fall.

“I’m trying to be true to my cover,” Alpha replied. “That means being the good cop sometimes.”

Before Sitwell could hit the ground a man in a pair of wings swooped low and grabbed him, and then they were hurtling back up, up and up and up to the roof again, where Sitwell dropped unceremoniously at Wannabe’s feet. “Zola’s algorithm is a program,” he gasped, one hand raised to ward them off and the other clutching at his chest. “It’s for choosing Insight’s targets.”

“Elaborate,” Wannabe growled.

“You,” he panted, eyes rolling. “The secretary of defense, a mayor in Cairo, a valedictorian in Iowa. Tony Stark, Stephen Strange, anyone who could be a threat to Hydra. Now or in the future.”

“The future? How could it know?”

Sitwell gave a hysterical laugh. “How could it not?” He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. “The twenty-first century is a digital book. Zola taught us how to read it. Voting patterns, emails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores! Zola’s algorithm evaluates people’s past to predict their future.”

“What then?” Sitwell shrank back. If whatever was left of Pierce didn’t kill him, any number of Hydra’s other heads would. “What then?” Wannabe demanded again. The Winter Soldier gripped his collar with a cold metal hand and gave him a sharp shake.

“Then the Insight helicarriers scratch people off the list. A few million at a time.”

“How do we stop it?”

“Stop it? _Stop it?_ You don’t stop it! Project Insight is bigger than you or me. It’s bigger even than Hydra itself! You kill Insight another one just like it will pop up. Cut off one head, two more will take its place. You have sixteen hours to go home and say goodbye to your families, make them count.”

“I don’t believe that,” Wannabe replied.

He forced himself to breathe. “I hope your blind optimism gives you some closure. I kind of wish I could be half as deluded as you, because you’ve just killed me.” He shrugged out of his jacket and out of the Soldier’s grip and pitched himself over the edge of the building where he should have tumbled to a nice quick death. But then the Wannabe grabbed his wrist and his descent ended in a snap of bone instead.

 “That’s enough,” he snapped over Sitwell’s pained shout and hauled him back to the roof of the building. Sitwell crumpled to the ground with a dry, wracking sob and Wannabe knelt in front of him so they were eye to eye. “No one is going to kill you on my watch, Agent Sitwell, not even you. You’re going to answer all my questions, and then we’re going to give you some old fashioned field medicine, okay?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sitwell hissed. “I’m a dead man. Even if you stop Insight, Hydra will not rest until I’m six feet under.”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it,” Wannabe promised. “No one knows you talked to us yet, and that gives us some time to play with.”

 

Sitwell talked. Alpha had always been an earnest little shit and he listened attentively. At his signal Bucky stepped into Sitwell’s space and the agent started shaking and babbling incoherently right up until Bucky put his wrist in a makeshift splint. Sitwell told them where he was keeping Guthman, and how she had been useless during interrogation. At a second signal from Alpha, Bucky pushed a bottle into Sitwell’s hands. Someone, probably Stark, slapped some duct tape over the original label and wrote FIELD MEDICINE on it in marker.

“Is this vodka?” Sitwell asked when he uncapped it. He took a tentative sip and sputtered.

“Nope. Field medicine,” Alpha assured him with a straight face. Sitwell choked down at least a few swallows and then Bucky half walked, half carried him down the stairs and into their getaway car. Natasha parked it close to the curb, about a block away from where they interrogated Sitwell, tantalizingly close but impossibly far.

At least two Strike teams flocked to their location, shouting and waving guns and being generally noisome. Bucky and Alpha exchanged a loaded glance. It was going to be one of those days. Bucky pulled his mask and goggles out of one of the folds in his tac suit and slid them into place.

 

 

Rumlow's first order of business: capturing the Soldiers. Only Sitwell, the spy extraordinaire, could run around with a bug in his phone for two weeks without knowing and give away all the information he so desperately wanted to keep to himself. As if such weak leverage could save him. And then Sitwell got himself kidnapped, interrogated, and injured. Rumlow didn’t want to kill Sitwell, the man would be a decent head for Hydra, but he wasn’t exactly making a good case for himself. Still, even as a kidnap victim he made himself useful in his very own special way.

Rumlow deployed two Strike teams and a handful of his favorite operatives to apprehend the Soldiers and their posse. He himself strolled onto the scene, the bright midday sun making his Kevlar vest feel heavy across his shoulders and he was glad he remembered his sunglasses to cut the worst of the glare. Shiny black SUVs and unmarked gray vans flooding the intersection at his signal. A chopper whirred overhead, and he let himself get a good look at it before hissing into his radio for his guys to hold off the execution. The man with the bootleg Falcon wings drew enough attention to bring in a helicopter from the news, and Rumlow’s assault wasn’t downplaying any of the drama.

He strolled to the center of the scene and took in his favorite Soldiers. The one was dolled up like Captain America, but the other one, Beta, looked like his usual self, goggles and muzzle and all. The looked loose and still, immobile like a leaf on the wind in the moment between rising and falling. Alpha had his shield on his arm, a bright red, white, and blue target painted on it with careful strokes. They were gearing up for a fight, an insane shootout by the looks of it, but Rumlow had other plans. Sitwell cringed from his place draped over Beta, the Black Widow on his other side. The guy with the Falcon wings watched him through reddish goggles, mouth pursed, probably trying to think of how many of his team he could airlift out of danger. Rumlow walked himself through the crowd of his people and right up to the wasp nest, happy to give it a kick.

Alpha looked him up and down, crude calculations written all over his face. “We’ll discuss the conditions of your surrender,” he said.

Rumlow always admired Alpha. Beta, in many ways, was easier to work with because he wasn’t insane, but Alpha had a certain edge to him. He followed orders from his handlers, from Rumlow, but he had a way of taking over ops, of playing leader whenever comms were down or less experienced teams lost their heads and the bullets started to fly. Alpha had charisma and, in his bolder moments, panache. He was going to break Alpha first. Slowly. While Beta watched.

Rumlow slid his sunglasses off his face, folded them primly, hung them from his shirt collar. He looked Alpha dead in the eye and slipped into Russian, the words coming to him easily despite the years between his last mission in Moscow and now. “ _Everything on earth is just waiting to merge with truth_.”

Alpha stiffened, the hard line of his mouth going slack before he answered in the tongue the Soviets taught him so well. “ _Just as moonlight merges with night._ ”  Behind him, Beta had the same stiff look to him, and Rumlow knew that his face had gone similarly slack behind the muzzle. The Black Widow's eyes widened in alarm, but panic had yet to set in. He would have to correct that. 

Rumlow fixed the group with a big friendly smile, a shark greeting his chums. “ _Kill the Widow and the Falcon_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guthman is taking advantage of something therapists call "transference." 
> 
> "...everything on earth is just waiting to merge with truth, just as moonlight merges with night." is a quote from Anton Pavlovich Checkov. I picked it at mostly random.
> 
> The title of this chapter comes from "All in the Suit that You Wear" by Stone Temple Pilots. 
> 
> Tony's jab about the vibranium shield being a fancy Frisbee is mostly a line I took from Ulron in Age of Ultron, because Ultron (spoiler alert!) was basically evil robot Tony.
> 
> This may look abandoned, but I promise I'm working on the next chapter. Like, for realsies.


	11. Waiting to Merge with Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The long awaited eleventh chapter! Guys, I literally had to grow as a person and a writer before I could write this. 
> 
> "You two didn’t do anything wrong. And any guilt you might be feeling? Is boring. It’s boring me. And frankly we don’t have time for it. So pull yourselves together and let’s punch Project Insight in the face.”

 

The Winter Soldiers were not strangers to death. They administered death to Hydra’s enemies for seventy-odd years. Death from above, from below, from within. In their line of work, they had more than a few close shaves, not all of them by mistake.

Alpha could remember the taste of cyanide blooming across his tongue, sliding down his throat, choking him. And he remembered everything going dark. Cold wafted over him, a New York winter gale despite the fact that he sank to African soil. In that moment, he knew he made the right decision; he could bend a lead pipe around his resolve. But something within him cried out, small and ineffectual, like a sparrow in the snow.

He wanted to live.

“ _Everything on earth is just waiting to merge with truth_.”

He could feel cold creeping along him as the mission imperative seized hold of him. This voice he could not resist. This voice drowned out the man he once was, the man he tried to become. This voice pinned him down and winded him up, and it would send him on the warpath.

“ _Kill the Widow and the Falcon_.”

Death from above, from below, from within.

 

“Sam, get out of here!” Natasha ordered, throwing Sitwell to the ground. She wasted no movement, raising her forearm to block Bucky’s blow.

Sam grabbed Sitwell and they might have gotten airborne if Alpha hadn’t taken a running leap and latched onto Sam’s ankle. He cussed and dropped a terrified Sitwell to the asphalt. “Damn! He’s heavier than he looks!” and he flinched away before Alpha’s fist could connect with his face.

Natasha dropped and kicked out, trying to sweep Beta’s legs out from under him. They spun, dancing closer and bouncing away.

“Steve, hey buddy! Snap outta it!” Sam gasped. Alpha’s expression didn’t change. A frozen mask of cold efficiency stared through Sam’s goggles, and that would be what sent cold sweat breaking across his skin in the dead of night. Because it would be one thing if the Winter Soldier enjoyed the kill, if he thrived in the thrill of the chase. But looking into Alpha’s impassive face, even as he struggled in his grip like a bird caught in a bear trap, there was no emotion. Only inevitability. The Winter Soldier is cold, not like an ice cube is cold, but like a knife is cold. The Winter Soldier is impersonal, not like a corporate pink slip is impersonal but like a snowstorm is impersonal. The Winter Soldier is efficient, not like a well-oiled machine is efficient, but like the Grim Reaper is efficient. Alpha wrapped a hand like steel around Sam’s throat, and _boy howdy this was It_. He sucked in his last breath, and cursed his luck even if it meant seeing Riley again.

Natasha slipped out of Beta’s grip, reached into her belt and felt a metal hand slap the little device out of her grip. She muttered something dark in Russian and countered his next attack. They spun, colliding and separating faster than humans should be allowed. She attacked, launching herself into the air, only to be neatly batted aside. She rolled, landed, skidded, scooped up the little device. Beta’s eyes didn’t widen, but they didn’t miss the way she ran her thumb over the thing’s surface and toss it in his direction, either. He tried to get away, but there’s only so far he could get in that split second, and he was not outside the blast radius for the little EMP.

The shock earned her a reprieve from Beta, but she couldn’t enjoy it. She darted to Sam’s rescue, kicking Alpha in the side hard enough to send him sprawling. No, not sprawling. He rolled and was on his feet, as graceful as any dancer, and now he was looking at her. Sam coughed and gasped, alive but useless for the next few minutes.

She could have cursed herself. The problem with being a good guy, was you started to think like a good guy. She slipped her gun out of its holder and pointed it straight for Rumlow’s face. “Stand down, or the handler gets it.”

The STRIKE teams tensed. Alpha watched her, eyes intent but dead at the same time.

Rumlow threw his head back and guffawed. “Good show, Romanov, but too little too late. You’re outmanned and outgunned.” He nodded at Alpha. “Proceed.”

“Don’t think I’ll miss,” Natasha snarled, her trigger finger tightening.

“Oh, give it up will ya!” Rumlow countered, hands in his pockets. “It’s over for you.”

Over the ringing of her ears, Natasha could make out the surly undertones of AC/DC and the hum of Stark technology. She didn’t deign to give Rumlow an answer. Well, not a verbal one. She squeezed the trigger and the world exploded around her.

 

Elizabeth Guthman was tired, wrung out and generally cranky. Seeing the Winter Soldiers, her prized clients, her last legacy, looking the way they had when she first met them was almost enough to pitch her over the edge. She took them in, prisoners of war bound by heavy magnetic handcuffs and they watch her in turn, unblinking, unflinching, as if she were an unwelcome stranger. She turned back to where Dr. Banner and Tony Stark fidgeted. “You want me to do what, exactly?”

Natasha, the Black Widow, lounged on the couch, looking tired and unhappy. “Rumlow used a code phrase.” She repeated it in Russian, and then the English translation. The Soldiers did not react. “And this is the result. After they tried to kill Sam and me, and nearly succeeded.”

“There’s no code phrase that’s going to bring them back to the way they were,” Guthman replied. Her nail beds hurt, a deep, cloying ache that travelled down her fingers, all the way to her wrists.

“Well what are we supposed to do!” Stark whined.

Guthman exchanged a look with Sam Wilson, the only sane man in the bunch. Then again, he broke into Fort Meade to steal technology that would allow him to fly, so…

Sanity is relative. She settled on the couch and contemplated the Winter Soldiers for a moment. “The human body and the human mind aren’t as separate as most people think. I could probably talk about mind-body dualism for days, but what it comes down to is action on the body becomes action on the psyche. What you’re asking for is a human reboot button.” Wilson raised an eyebrow but Stark nodded vigorously.

“But there’s no reboot button,” Stark pointed out.

Guthman gave him a Look. “No, there’s no code phrase. As far as reboot buttons go, we’re spoiled for choice. There are any number of reboot options, depending on what processes you want to disturb and how you want to disturb them. I take it that you brought them down with ICERs? Then we’ve already ruled out the unconsciousness option.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “ECT is right out. We don’t have the equipment for magnetic resonance. I can tell they’ve already been bonked on the head, so that can be ruled out.” A blow to the temple with enough force to initiate cognitive recalibration would probably kill them, but a word spoken out of place wouldn’t even register. A pang of homesickness gripped her. She wondered what Dr. Friedberg would have to say, how she would handle the situation.

In times like these, she found herself dipping into her childhood, especially the words of wisdom from the white trash parts of her family. The soldiers did not move when she dropped to her aching knees in front of them. She stuck her left index finger into her mouth—that one still had the nail on it—and took it back out with a satisfied popping sound.

Stark started squawking when she inserted it into Alpha’s ear. “No! No! Oh my _God_!”

Alpha gave a full body shudder and listed sideways. Guthman performed the same procedure on Beta, who hissed a breath between his teeth but remained upright. She scrambled back a few feet and waited.

“Is…is that all?” Sam asked.

“Just wait.”

For several long moments the Winter Soldiers remained perfectly motionless, their expression frozen and blank. Guthman was unaccountably glad they were in the middle of nowhere when the screaming started. “This might take a while,” she mouthed over the racket, and got up to make a sandwich.

 

Rumlow’s eyes blinked open and his hand shot out, grabbing an egghead by the throat. “Ohshitohshitohshitohshit!” the other tech squawked, and hastily pried Rumlow’s fingers open. He gurgled on the gurney. His free hand scrabbled at his face, exploring the fancy new crater in his forehead. That would explain the splitting headache, then.

“Sir, please, you need to stay still!” Egghead 2 rambled.

The thing was, he really didn’t need to do jack shit. He sat up with only a little wobbling, and picked at the mess that was his forehead until his fingers touched something hard and tacky with blood. He picked at it until he unearthed it from his skin, let the little lead slug plink on the gummy linoleum. Blood trickled down his face, over his mouth with a taste of iron, staining his shirt and slacks. He snagged Egghead 2 by the shirtfront and gave him a little shake. “Bring me Sitwell,” he growled.

“I, I don’t—“

“Bring me Sitwell!” he thundered. His veins must be full of burning oil, popping and searing and making his bones shudder in their sockets. He pressed his fingers over the healing ruins of his knee and gave it a squeeze that brought the lab back into sharp focus.

First, he would part Sitwell from whatever he knew about the Soldiers’ motives. Then, he would part Sitwell from his still beating heart. And last, he would part the Winter Soldiers from this lifetime.

 

Alpha came too with the feeling of something clawed trying to make its way out of his gut. He unstuck his cheek from the floor and, by inches, arranged himself into a sitting position. Situational awareness trickled in, and he tried to whip his head around to take in his surroundings, but he only managed a kind of drunken swaying.

Guthman didn’t look up from her book, though she did turn the page. “Stop,” she told him. A simple enough command, but one he couldn’t seem to follow.

“Beta,” he rasped, throat rebelling around the single word, the most important word in his vocabulary.

“He’s fine, for a given value of fine,” Guthman told him, brisk and cool but not, overall, unkind.

Alpha lumbered to his feet and pressed his shoulder blades against the wall. The hard coolness sank through his shirt. He let his weight press down through his heels, and the room slowed its spinning long enough for him to open his eyes and shamble into the kitchen. Guthman followed.

She moved slowly, every motion pained and stiff. His eyes wouldn’t meet hers, but they did catch on the bright white of bandages wrapped around her fingers. She rested a hand on his shoulder and steered him into a chair. Within minutes a sandwich and a glass of orange juice appeared in front of him. His body desperately needed the calories, but he found himself staring listlessly in front of him until Guthman disappeared. Her footsteps echoed down the hall, paused in front of a bedroom, and then she returned to the kitchen tugging along Beta like a frightened child. She plunked him in the chair beside Alpha, and then there was another sandwich, a twin glass of juice.

They ate in silence, and if Alpha crowded next to the other Winter Soldier, no one said anything about it.

“You two are going to try to blame yourselves for that stunt Rumlow pulled. I’m sure that if I had the energy I would be able to couch this in gentler language, but haven’t slept in thirty-six hours and everything hurts, so I’m just going to spit it out. You two didn’t do anything wrong. And any guilt you might be feeling? Is boring. It’s boring me. And frankly we don’t have time for it. So pull yourselves together and let’s punch Project Insight in the face.”

 

The Sedan broke down on the outskirts of a small town. Keiko popped the hood despite the sinking feeling in her gut. “Yep, that’s definitely a car,” she muttered. Aunt Peggy hobbled around to look inside as well.

She shrugged. “I never got the hang of these newfangled cars,” she sniffed. “We’ll just have to walk into town and call a ride.”

Keiko slammed the hood back down. “I don’t think so, Aunt Peggy.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because we’re on the run, Aunt Peggy.” They had been over this twice already today, but Keiko couldn’t find it in herself to be mad.

“Goodness, are we?” she said, like she always did. Like it wasn’t that big of a deal, being on the run.

“Hydra will be looking for us because we had contact with the Winter Soldiers,” she went on. She walked around the side of the car and pulled out the wheelchair. After a couple false starts she got it unfolded. Peggy hobbled around the other side of the car and started pulling out necessities—their purses, a blanket, the box of granola bars, her medicine bag, and some other odds and ends.

“Hydra never changes,” she tutted. “I don’t suppose you have any tactical background?”

“I’m a journalist, Aunt Peggy. Why do you have assault weapons in there?” she demanded with rising alarm.

Peggy snorted. “Why wouldn’t I? Do you know how to handle a gun?”

“No.”

“A pity. What are they teaching the youth these days.” She handed a serviceable pistol to her anyway. Keiko held it at arm’s length, lips curled.

“Is this strictly necessary?”

Peggy raked her hands through the bottom of the crate and palmed one of the smaller toys while her other hand jabbed an accusatory finger at her. “If we’re going on the run, we’re going in style, missy.” She slipped the little egg up her sleeve, mindful of the pin holding it together. It wouldn’t do to go to pieces at this juncture, now would it. She settled gratefully into the wheelchair and huddled under the blanket. “Onward!”

 

Doctor Banner opened his mouth, and the look on his face pulled something in Bucky’s chest hard enough to snap. “I don’t care that it wasn’t my fault,” he growled, lips peeled away from gritted teeth.

Banner shut his mouth with a click. And just like that, a whole new wave of guilt washed over Bucky. He pressed the heel of his metal hand against an eye socket. “Sorry. It’s just. Every time I close my eyes I see Natasha getting slapped through the air, and it’s me doing it, and I don’t have a choice. So yeah. It’s not my fault. But that doesn’t change the fact that. It’s still my hands. My body. My mind. Maybe it would be easier if it were my fault.”

Bruce settled into the chair opposite Bucky and grabbed an orange out of the fruit bowl for something to occupy his hands. “I don’t want to say I understand.” Bucky gave a snort and Bruce allowed himself a small smile. “I kinda talked to, to Steve about it already. I don’t always let the Other Guy out on purpose you know.” He dug a thumbnail into the fleshy pith. Citrus spiked the air. “I don’t usually remember what goes on with the Other Guy, though. I get nightmares sometimes, sense memories. Sometimes a smell, or the way light flashes, or a texture will nail me right in the brain where _he_ lives. And it sucks. I have no control over it, and I can’t predict it, and it’s not my fault—I didn’t do anything to deserve it—but knowing that doesn’t make it better.” The orange freshly disrobed, he split it apart and offered one half to Bucky.

He turned the fruit over in his hands. It was sweet, almost painfully so, enough to make him screw up his face as he bit through that first section. “How do you deal with it?” he asked the remaining sections.

Bruce chewed, eyes thoughtful. “Badly,” he decided. “I run away, mostly. All across the world. At any given moment, I am completely, just, exhausted. I run and I hide and when I’m not doing that I’m working and trying to lose myself by helping others. I wouldn’t suggest it. It doesn’t work.”

Bucky gave a jerky nod, chewing through the last of the fruit. He tapped his fingernails over a metal plate. “Sometimes I feel like Frankenstein’s Monster, all cut up and put together wrong and let loose on the innocent villagers.”

“Tell me about it. I don’t even have a good excuse—I’m both Frankenstein and his monster.” He jabbed an orange slice in Bucky’s direction. “Word to the wise: don’t experiment on yourself.”

“But don’t you know, doctor? Frankenstein was the monster all along,” Bucky countered, and his smile looked too forced but it was there. He got up to leave, but Bruce reached out, not touching but the movement was enough to still him.

“I’m not going to tell you that it’s all going to work out in the end, because I’m not a goddamn asshole,” Bruce told him, voice soft. “But I’m around, okay? And Tony has his own stuff going on, but if anyone knows about being held captive and made to do something you don’t want to, he’s your man.” He breathed out. “It’s just, we’re in your corner, okay? We’re on your side.”

Bucky gave another jerky nod, not trusting his voice, and he fled the kitchen for the welcome foliage of the outdoors. Citrusy sweetness lingered under his fingernails, as stubborn as it was welcome.

 

Alpha didn’t want to think. He braced his feet apart and swung the axe in a smooth arc, splitting the weathered spruce into more manageable pieces. The motions came to him as easily as breathing, programmed into his muscles and bones. No matter how hard he scrabbled through his memory, he couldn’t turn up any missions that required woodland labor. He found a serviceable wheelbarrow behind the cabin and loaded it up.

“He’s elegance! He’s grace! He’s Mister United States!”

Alpha brushed his hands off and fixed Tony Stark with his blankest stare. “You joke, but I have been to beauty pageants in a professional capacity before.”

He actually faltered a step, eyebrows making a break for his hairline. “No way. As, like, a model?”

“As an assassin,” he told him, gesturing to himself.

“Oh my God that’s the most Zoolander thing I’ve ever heard. Show me the smolder, Capsicle!”

Alpha only understood maybe every third word of that, and he was too weary to ask for clarification. The sooner he was done dealing with Stark, the better. For everyone. “Is there something I can help you with, Stark?”

He speared Alpha with his most dazzling smile, even as he shoved his hands into his pockets. That was another thing about Stark—if his hands had to be still, then they would be hidden. It was the kind of gesture that sent one part of Alpha’s brain picking over Stark’s person, looking for concealed weapons and tells that he was about to strike. The other half merely wondered what else he was hiding. “Yeah, I just wanted to see what you were up to. Nice wood cutting skills, by the way. Very woodsmanny. Never thought of you as a lumberjack, but you’re starting to get the beard for it, so, I mean, you might as well.”

Alpha turned back to the wheelbarrow. “I am functional.” He hefted the thing onto its wheel and trundled for the cabin’s eaves.

“So you’re not going to try to kill us all in our sleep?” He tried to make it sound joking, but his voice came off too strained.

Alpha breathed through his nose. He ducked into the shade of the cabin and stacked the wood with military neatness. When Stark took breath to begin another barrage of words Alpha unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “I would understand. If. If the team wouldn’t want me on the mission. Bucky and I are. Compromised. We always were.”

Stark blinked at him. “Cap.”

“It would make sense,” he continued, having built up momentum and unable to stop himself. “There’s no telling what other trigger phrases there could be. Hydra could be just waiting to use them, and this mission…We can’t fight each other if we’re going to make this work. We can. We can do the planning and I always intended for Iron Man and Hulk to do the heavy lifting anyway.”

“No,” Tony said sharply. “We need you.”

“No,” Alpha echoed, just as sharp. “The _world_ needs the Avengers. And what happens if the Winter Soldiers kill one of you? We can’t afford to lose any of you.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, exhausted.

“You’re an Avenger too.”

“The thing is, I’m not. The Avengers Initiative was Fury’s brain child, and the Winter Soldiers didn’t factor into it at all. If we did, it would have been to post big block letters on our foreheads saying INELIGIBLE.”

“Big deal,” Tony scoffed. “I was ineligible too until about five minutes after Loki wandered onto Earth. Fury isn’t the boss of us. The Avengers Initiative outgrew him, and SHIELD, and all that bullshit. We’re a cool boyband now. We could buy a bus.”

Alpha pressed his back against the cabin’s wall. “A bus?” he murmured, lost.

“Sorry, the analogy was getting away from me. The point is, you’re one of us. Consider the Chitauri a hazing ritual. We’re brothers now. Look, what happened today sucked. I get that. But what are a few near-lethal attacks between friends, huh?”

And God save him, but Stark actually meant it. “It’s—it’s not like I got mad and took a swing at…at Sam. I couldn’t help it. Rumlow used a code phrase and I had no control over my actions any more. I’m not safe to be around.”

“Meh. We’ll work around it.”

 

 


	12. Plan of Attack: Attack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You know, I don’t think we’ve properly thought this out,” Tony chattered. Bruce stared down at the imposing hatch doors, solid and unyielding and gray. “The speed we’re going right now, the wind is going to peel your eyelids clean off before we make it to the helicarrier.” Bruce hooked an arm across Tony’s armored neck. “There’s no way this is going to work.” He slung his other arm over his shoulder, spread his hand over the eerie blue glow of his arc reactor.   
> “Tony.”  
> “Yeah?”  
> “Shut up and let’s do this thing.”   
> His eyes slipped open and the world yawned below him, the helicarrier racing up to meet him.   
> He let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some trigger warning stuff at the bottom. Nothing too graphic, but I'd hate for anyone to be unpleasantly surprised.

When Keiko got to her hotel room, she locked the door behind her, pressed her back against it, and slid down to the floor. A noiseless sob bubbled up in her chest.

They had come for them. She ran, pushing Peggy in her wheelchair but her two legs were no match for three shiny SUVs and they had them surrounded. Keiko wasn’t a spy. She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t anything. And she hadn’t known what to do until Aunt Peggy started shooting and hollering, “Run, Keiko, run!” And Keiko bolted, sickened even while she went, leaving Peggy Carter to the wolves.

She washed her hands and arms and face in the bathroom. There was blood spatter on her shirt, turning brown. The blood didn’t belong to her.

She gripped the edge of the counter until her knuckles turned white. She didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t a Commando. She wasn’t smart or technical or athletic. She was nothing, and Hydra was coming for her. It was only a matter of time before they kicked in the door and put her down like a dog. She stared at herself in the mirror and wished she could just go home. She ached with the want of it, to be somewhere safe and quiet and above all else normal. But she couldn’t go home. She might never see home again.

And wasn’t that the real kicker? Her grandfather had fought against fascism and Hydra in World War II, and now she was going to be killed by the same. What was it all for? Some legacy she turned out to be, just sitting here waiting to be snatched up like a half drowned kitten.

Keiko scrubbed at her eyes. What would Grandpa Jim do?

 

The real tragedy of growing old, Peggy felt, was in the little everyday things. After her eyes started to go bad, she couldn’t drive wherever she wanted. After the bones in her legs started to deteriorate, she had to live in that damn facility instead of her home. And then her mind started to go and it was like living with two illnesses: the memory problems themselves, and knowing about the memory problems. Somedays she didn’t recognize her caregivers, or her family members. Somedays she didn’t even recognize herself, like her withered hands belonged to someone, the woman in the mirror suddenly a stranger.

Other days she put on a good show, but behind her brittle smile she knew herself to be unreliable. She knew she was on the decline. On those days she couldn’t help but look for the metaphorical exit signs. She had contingency plans in place. Peggy Carter never waited around for any man, and she wasn’t going to start at this time of her life, just because the Grim Reaper seemed to be beating around the bush.

Hydra scooped her up but they didn’t kill her. They put her in a windowless van and transported her a little ways. She spent most of the journey dozing; the past few days had been exciting but draining and she wasn’t as young as she used to be. They unloaded her with care, which she appreciated. She recognized Sitwell bossing the grunts around, and to her satisfaction he made sure to personally escort her to her cell.

“It’s specially outfitted just for you, ma’am,” he said. He pushed her chair down the corridor. The wheels squeaked periodically, though she supposed she wouldn’t have to worry about that.

“Jasper, I know this is Hydra,” she snapped. “You can drop the pretense. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Here we are!” he said with forced cheer. He rapped a knuckle against the door and beamed down at her. “Triple reinforced titanium. Four different lock sequences and two separate identification processes. No one without a level six clearance or higher can open this door, and wouldn’t you know it, I was given that very same clearance yesterday.”

“Bully for you.”

He smirked and pressed his hand to the scan pad. A panel beside the door slid aside and a retinal scanner flashed over his right eye. Mechanisms in the belly of the door groaned and slid into place. Peggy counted the seconds in her head, her eyebrows slowly rising higher and higher as the door took longer and longer to open. “You’re kidding. For little old me?”

Finally the door yawned open. “Not just for you,” Sitwell amended. He pushed the chair inside and left it beside the narrow little cot so she could climb into it at her leisure. “See, with you on lock down, we’re expecting some very special visitors soon, and it wouldn’t do to let them get to you too easily.”

“Using me as bait for the Winter Soldiers,” she sniffed. “Not exactly groundbreaking.”

“But it will be effective. Get some rest, ma’am. We’re in for an exciting day tomorrow.” He waggled his fingers at her while he backed out of the room and she fixed him with a glassy, beatific smile. The door shut easily enough and locked with a solid set of clicks.

“You have no idea, sonny,” she sneered to the empty air.

 

Tony worried the flash drive between his fingers. A little voice in his head that sounded like Jarvis—the first Jarvis, the flesh and blood Jarvis of his childhood—told him he should buckle down and give it to his team. There wouldn’t be a good time; there was never a good time for bad news. “Steve, you’re gonna want to see this.”

Something in his face must have given him away, or maybe it was that he so seldom called him by his actual given name. Steve straightened up from the transparencies of hellicarrier blueprints. Tony held out the little drive. “I think you’re going to want to sit down.”

They put the flash drive in Fury’s desktop console. Tony stayed on the couch because he had seen it already, but Steve, Bucky, Natasha and Bruce crowded around the monitor. On the screen, a sparse cell, windowless, illuminated by harsh fluorescent lights and deathly silent. Center stage, the star of the horror show: Peggy Carter squinted through her bifocals at the camera, bird thin wrists zip tied to the armrests of her chair. Steve’s fists clenched. Behind him, Bucky stopped breathing.

“Steve. Bucky. Any SHIELD operatives who may be watching this. I have been abducted and I am currently being held against my will in an underground base.” She squinted and grimaced. “Hard to read the cue cards from all the way back here. Don’t make that face, Jasper, I’m an old woman. Would it kill you to write a little bigger? Now I’ve lost my place. You know, my eyes were just fine in Gdansk, and now they’ve gone all to hell. Cataracts, can you believe it? Hmm?” Steve pushed away abruptly and left the room, hands shaking. Bucky hadn’t moved. He didn’t blink. On the screen, Peggy soldiered on with an unmistakable eye roll. “Fine, fine. It says, ‘What happens next is up to you. Do you rescue old Peggy Carter, or do you waste precious time stalling Project Insight. You have until tomorrow to make up your mind.’ There, are you happy?”

 

Sitwell powered off the camera and set it aside. “Yes, Agent Carter. You could’ve cried a little, you know. Sell it.”

Peggy lifted her chin, every bit the haughty English national. “What are you going to do with me, Jasper?”

He smirked. “I’ve been thinking about that. It doesn’t seem very sporting to kill an old lady.”

“You don’t give one hot damn about sportsmanship,” she sniffed. “But if memory serves, you also don’t like getting your hands dirty, isn’t that right? Field work was beneath you. Killing, doubly so.”

“You think you have all the answers, don’t you?”

“Just the ones that matter.”

The grenade hit the floor. It should have sounded louder, like a thunderclap. Dramatic. But there’s only so much one can do with a lightweight explosive and linoleum tile. Sitwell’s mouth fell open when he saw it. He took an abortive step backward, toward the door. The locked door.

“Takes eighteen seconds to get that damn thing open,” Peggy sighed. She picked a fleck of imaginary dirt out from under a fingernail. “And that grenade is a Stark Special. In a nice closed room like this, I couldn’t say what it’s going to do to the insides of your compound, but if you’ve ever taken a hand beater to the inside of a bee hive…something like that, I think.”

Sitwell pounded on the steel door, sweating. “You’re bluffing,” he gasped. Mechanisms deep inside its hull groaned to life, slotting themselves along predetermined paths. The seconds dragged by.

Behind him, Peggy grinned the maniacal grin of an invalid given immense power. And then their world went white with a sound so loud it came out the other side, into perfect silence.

 

Keiko clenched a toothpick between her teeth. She listened to the voices outside her door and let herself be perfectly still. The adrenaline of the last day had worn off and she worked through the exhaustion. Now she rode her second wind, and she idly wondered if this was what it was like to go insane. The grout and tile of the bathroom looked sharper than sharp. In her chest, her heart beat steadily. She felt very alive and present and unreal, like she might fade away if she didn’t clench her teeth together.

The voices outside drew nearer, and then disappeared. The footfalls stopped. Her toothpick flicked to the other corner of her mouth.

The door to her room burst inward like a shotgun blast, splinters flying. She didn’t breathe. The black ops team stepped inside with care, but, perhaps, not warily enough. One black boot stepped down on the fishing line tripwire, which tugged a dish out of place, which slipped from its shelf onto the carpet, soaked and still stinking with gasoline, its contents splashing across the bedside table.

(Keiko winced. The night auditor would not be getting her gas can back.)

“Don’t,” one of the agents hissed. In the bathroom, Keiko checked her watch.

“Rube Goldberg machines,” another agent snickered.

The alarm clock on the side table blared to life. The agents ignored it, picking through the room. One of them checked under the bed, another inside the closet. Keiko’s hands started to shake. Time stretched, and she waited on a single strand as thin and tenuous as salt water taffy. The alarm blared louder, but the cord she stripped began to fizzle in its fresh puddle. A spark arced.

The bathroom door slammed open, nearly torn off its hinges. Flame bloomed across the carpet, the bedspread, the room. It travelled with an audible whoosh. It licked up the faded wallpaper, up the team’s boots. They yowled. A gloved hand yanked aside the shower curtain. Keiko raised her gun, finger on the trigger.

_Grandpa on the couch, an arm thrown across her shoulder, some old timey wester on the TV._

Outside the bathroom the men cried out, the fire blazing hot, a window breaking. Inside the bathroom she stared down a Hydra agent, trapped in a bubble of silence, sitting on a strand of time getting thinner and thinner and—

_“Bad gun etiquette,” Grandpa Jim grunted. The toothpick in his mouth rolled. He so seldom spoke, so when he did Keiko took care to listen closely. On the TV, two gunmen faced off in perfect stillness._

Shattering glass tinkled, and the strand broke. The agent stared at her, raised a hand to brush the gun out of his face. “You wouldn’t dare,” he sneered with straight, white teeth.

_“You never point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them,” Grandpa told her, his mouth a flat line. “You put a gun in someone’s face, you need to be prepared to blow them away. If your gun’s out, this isn’t a time for talking. It’s too late. They’re as good as dead.”_

You’re not a killer,” the agent said. Keiko’s hands shook. He was a man of blood and flesh and bone. He had an orthodontist, to have teeth that straight. He had a house and probably a dog and…and…and…

_“If your gun’s out, you better be ready to do what you need to do. You need to be sure, because it changes you as a person. You don’t come back from that.”_

“Put that thing down.”

The toothpick in her mouth twitched. Her hands shook. Outside the bathroom the flames roared, the men fled into the hall, she could feel the heat inching into the shower stall.

“Listen, you’re not a killer,” he said. “I can help you. Please.”

 

Natasha found Steve on what passed for a lawn. It was really just a patch of ground with slightly more dead leaves and slightly less undergrowth than the rest of the property. He didn’t stir at her approach. “Mind if I sit?”

He lifted one shoulder and let it drop. She settled beside him with a little space between them. They sat in silence for some time, neither of them moving. She could be patient; patience came with the job, and she was quite good at it. A small part of her did worry that the Winter Soldier, this one, would be tougher to crack than her previous targets. From what she had seen, he was all twisted up inside. A lot of fear, and confusion, the occasional flash of temper. The first few years being free of the Red Room felt like an eternity ago, blurred and smeared by time and work, a dangerous and unstable lifestyle. Working with the Winter Soldiers, though. They seemed to bring some clarity back, some things into perspective.

Somewhere in the forest, a blue jay sang. “Gdansk?”

Steve nodded. “Never had a mission there,” he said, the words sounding like they were being pulled from a long ways. “It was a code. Gdansk—I’m already dead.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“She said, ‘and everything went to hell.’” He rubbed a hand over his face. “That means, don’t look for a body. I don’t know where they took Peg, but…it’s probably a smoldering crater by now.”

Bucky padded down to them, hands jammed in his pockets. “She died doing what she loved; killin’ Nazis.”

Steve gave a sharp bark of laughter, the corners of his eyes wet. He swiped at them. “This doesn’t change anything. We’re still going for the helicarriers directly.”

“The good doctor wants us,” Bucky said. He reached out a hand that Natasha ignored. He didn’t miss a beat, merely stepped over to Steve and pulled him up.

“Any reason?” Steve asked, immediately guarded. Natasha noticed that they didn’t break apart, hands still clasped between them like it hadn’t occurred to them to let go.

Bucky blew a strand of dark hair out of his face. “Doctor Guthman said something about stacking the deck, whatever that means. Apparently it’s a time suck, though, so if we’re gonna make it on the helicarriers in time we better go see her now.”

Somewhere in the forest, a blue jay sang.

 

Bruce took a mild sedative about twenty minutes before they boarded the Tony’s jet. He didn’t want to think about the job before him over much. He stretched out and let the rumble of the engines drill into his head. Across the cabin, the Winter Soldiers sat with their knees pressed together, silent and still. With each passing minute Tony got more restless. He paced the cabin and chattered to anyone who would listen—Jarvis, mostly. Natasha made herself a nest in the back of the jet and put her head down for a bit. Bruce wondered if she was really sleeping. Who could sleep at a time like this?

Deployment felt like it took an eternity. Bruce peeled himself out of his chair and followed Tony to the back of the plane. He could feel his heartrate ticking up a bit, but it was within acceptable parameters. As an afterthought, he took off his glasses and tossed them onto Natasha’s seat. “Ready when you are.” They passed through the doors and down into the belly of the jet.

“You know, I don’t think we’ve properly thought this out,” Tony chattered. Bruce stared down at the imposing hatch doors, solid and unyielding and gray. “The speed we’re going right now, the wind is going to peel your eyelids clean off before we make it to the helicarrier.” He hooked an arm across Tony’s armored neck. “There’s no way this is going to work, Bruce.” He slung his other arm over his shoulder, spread his hand over the eerie blue glow of his arc reactor.

“Tony.”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up and let’s do this thing.” The hatch groaned open and he squeezed his eyes shut. This was the part he’d been dreading. Not the wind, the height, the freefall, the endless sky. No, he always dreaded the letting go. The comm in his ear crackled to life, Fury’s voice telling him, “Now, Banner!” Bruce unclenched his fists and let himself fall, arms wide, legs spread. His eyes slipped open and the world yawned below him, his helicarrier racing up to meet him.

He let go.

 

Tony didn’t often get to see a giant green rage monster unfold before his very eyes, but there was something about it he was sure he would never get accustomed to. The Hulk slammed into the helicarrier at terminal velocity, like a brick landing on a glass coffee table. Part of him wished he could just hang here and bear witness to the excellence that is the Hulk given free rein. “Stark,” Fury snapped in his ear.

“Ugh, I’m on it. You know, you’re not the director of me.” He swooped low on the second helicarrier. The hull would be sturdy enough to resist repulsor fire, but if he could get to the turbine he could really throw a wrench in the works. The real trick would be sending the thing into the Potomac instead of the city…

 

“Take this.”

Steve took the offered parachute and strapped it on. The smart response he had lined up turned to ash in his mouth. Bucky’s hand lingered on his shoulder, solid and grounding and as fleeting as the pink of dawn. Somewhere along the way, he had acquired lines around his eyes, his mouth, a few gray hairs scattered in the coarse stubble of their chin. When had they gotten so old? But underneath he could see, yes, there, the careless youth of his boyhood, a smuggler of cigarettes and penny candy, a snappy dresser, a good dancer, a blue-eyed romancer. The hand on his shoulder tightened. “Ready?”

Steve breathed out hard through his nose. “Not like we could live forever.” The hatch opened and they dropped down into the empty air.

 

Keiko huddled up on the top of the water tower, where she could watch the smoldering wreckage of the hotel burn uninterrupted. She chewed her toothpick. She suspected she didn’t know what she was doing but, at this point, she couldn’t be asked to care. The stand was simple enough—she had used tripods more complicated, honestly. It’s amazing the things people leave in their cars unattended, people being Hydra agents she had burned alive, unattended cars being their pretty black SUVs after she was done shooting the windows all to shit. Really, if she could want for anything, she’d want a second person with her. Some kind of spotter. This was annoying to do on her own with just one pair of eyes.

Wind whipped past her, tossing her hair. She was glad of it—it felt like a baptism. Like if the wind blew hard enough, it could wash her of the sweat and terror and gas fumes still clinging to her clothes, her hair, her pores. But whenever the wind calmed she could smell it on her, and she wondered if this was what rebirth was really about—not of being made new but of being jammed into a crucible, melted down and re-forged into something harder, sharper, crueler. She peered through the scope. Hydra should really invest in less distinct cars. Their SUV’s gleamed in the afternoon sun, like beacons of mock efficiency, the illusion of power. Keiko let out a breath, squeezed the trigger. Their windows were tougher than most tire irons (she would be sore tomorrow for sure) but their tires were another story. She couldn’t hear the brakes screech from her nest, but she gritted her teeth and made the sound effect herself.

Keiko rolled onto her back and contemplated the vast emptiness of the universe for a moment. She wondered how long it would be before Hydra found her again. How long she could keep running before she succumbed to exhaustion or regular human frailty.

(And some traitorous part of her wondered what her mother was doing at that very moment. She never did call her back.) But laying like this, it would be all too easy to let her eyelids droop shut, too easy to let the stress leak from her back and into the cold, unyielding roof of the water tower. And she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t tempted. She could fall asleep like this and let come Hydra or high water. It would be a surrender.

She rolled back onto her front, peered through the scope. There would be time to sleep later.

 

They landed on the helicarrier, their downward momentum only just checked by billowing nylon. The Hulk could demolish a helicarrier through brute force, and Ironman could royally screw one up from the inside, but a soldier in the right place at the right time, would have to take more care. The Winter Soldiers would slip inside, remove the chip, jump out and let Fury take out fifty years of betrayal on the newly useless helicarrier.

They moved through the aircraft. Steve could still smell the newness of it, of metal and concrete only just folded into shape and bolted into place. In the center, he opened the hub and plucked out the little silicon chip. It fitted in his hand, wafer thin between his gloved fingers. He could snap it in half, like a popsicle stick. All this fuss, and for what?

“Cap,” Bucky warned. Steve pivoted, shield raised.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” Rumlow slinked on deck, his metal brace almost soundless, his gait heavy and sure.

“Goddamn cockroach motherfucker,” Bucky muttered, sighting down the nose of his gun. Steve’s gut clenched, and Rumlow raised his own gun, squared his shoulders. They didn’t breathe. They didn’t move.

“You know, I always wondered if it would end like this,” Rumlow mused. “The Assets going rogue and I have to put them down.”

Steve’s grip tightened on the shield. If he could just put himself between Rumlow and Bucky…

But there was a traitorous part of him that teetered on the thought of being put down, another Hydra weapon decommissioned after too many fatalities. Would it really be the worst thing that could happen to him?

Would it?

“We’re not going anywhere,” Bucky gritted out. Steve forced air into his lungs. “You’re not going to do it, because you’re a coward.” His lips peeled back from his teeth, a parody of a grin. “You’ve always been a coward, Brock, right down in your core and no enhancements, no training, no brainwashing is ever gonna fix you. Deep down, I think you know that.”

The smirk slipped off his face. “Is that what you know, Beta? Because the way that I see it, _everything on Earth is just waiting to merge with truth_.”

They could feel cold creeping along him as the mission imperative seized hold of them. This voice they could not resist. This voice drowned out the men they once were, the men they wanted to become. This voice pinned them down and wound them up, and it would send them on the warpath.

And underneath it, a dying ember, a whisper snatched away by the fury of a storm, Steve thought, _This isn’t fair._

His jaw went slack. Before him, Bucky—Beta—lowered his gun, shifted into something resembling parade rest.

_This isn’t fair._

“Good boy,” Rumlow cooed, lowering his pistol. He didn’t take his finger off the trigger. “You are to put that chip back in its slot, Alpha. Now.”

Alpha moved, body stiff. He opened the hatch and slotted the wafer of silicon back in place. It clicked. Something, somewhere, hummed.

“This is easier, isn’t it?” Rumlow sighed. He rubbed at his forehead gingerly. Alpha and Beta didn’t answer. “Obedience is easier. Pain comes and goes but doing what you need to do? That’s forever.” He peered down through the green house floor, at the smoking wreckage of the first and second helicarriers. His mouth twitched. “You know, the original plans for these things was triangulation. You need three points to make a triangle but, it turns out, the weaponry system on just one of these bad boys is enough to give the world the kick it needs. And, well, with you two back in line I’m sure we can get another two helicarriers out of the World Security Council.”

They didn’t answer. The Winter Soldiers were not made for conversation. They were made for blood.

Rumlow let out a breath and made his way back the way he’d come, pushing his gun back into its holster. “Don’t worry boys. It’ll be a lot of heavy lifting, but in the end compliance is rewarded.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for minor character death. Peggy dies doing her favorite thing- killin' Nazis. Also some suicide ideation; nothing really concrete but Peggy is ready to Go.   
> TW for Keiko going full Home Alone on Hydra. You know, as one does.


End file.
